


Footprints in the Dust

by Nell65



Category: La Femme Nikita
Genre: F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-20
Updated: 2013-03-20
Packaged: 2017-12-05 22:43:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 54,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/728732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nell65/pseuds/Nell65
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>For a timeless moment, Nikita could only stand frozen, blinking madly to clear away the fantastic image of a long dead Mick Schtopel bearing down on them, three rent-a-goons trailing in his wake.</i>
</p><p>Set 19 years after the final episode, a different possible future for Michael and Nikita.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Footprints in the Dust

**Author's Note:**

> For Jaybee
> 
> Many, many thanks to my beta readers, sk and Jaybee. I would never have finished this story without you.

For Jaybee:

_L'aéroport d'Orly, Paris, France, Nineteen Years After the Events in “A Time for Every Purpose.”_

“Daddy! Daddy! Hurry up! I see Baron’s box!” A child’s lilting voice rose briefly above the general clamor of mid-day arrivals and departures.

In a moment a little girl, no more than six or seven, appeared. She wove determinedly through the thinning crowd, her soft copper curls bouncing as she moved, dragging an older man by the hand. She was heading for the airy, sunlit end of the terminal where the airline workers deposited traveling kennels.

Once they were free of the crush near the center of the main concourse, the man halted. His worn khaki bush hat, pulled low over his forehead, obscured but did not hide his strong roman nose or his long, square chin as he scanned the area around them. “Gabrielle. Wait for your sisters.”

“But Daddy! Baron’s right over there!” Gabrielle wailed. She tugged impatiently on her father’s hand, trying to brace her pink plastic sandals on the slick polished floor. She waved desperately with one skinny, tan arm toward a large, travel-worn blue dog carrier. “Daddy!” 

The carrier suddenly emitted a few loud and impressively deep barks.

The man was wearing rumpled, off-white trousers and a pale, soft cotton camp shirt, a costume adopted almost universally by European men working in the tropics of Africa or Asia. He bent his neck just enough to catch his daughter’s eye and repeated, in a very firm tone, “Wait.” 

Gabrielle glared, then pouted, and then, with a slump of her shoulders she dropped her eyes and stopped pulling on his arm. Her own brightly printed sundress, red splashed with large, white flowers, also suggested that they were recently arrived from somewhere much warmer than Paris in February.

The man turned to look back in the direction they had come, searching the crowds behind them for the rest of their party. 

After a minute or two a cluster of adults and children broke free and surrounded Gabrielle and her father. A considerable array of canvas bags and well-used hiking packs thudded to their feet as they drew to a stop. The group gradually resolved itself and a large family took shape; father, mother, five brightly dressed daughters, and a dark young man in his middle twenties. Gabrielle, more than a head shorter than the next largest girl, was obviously the youngest child.

A rapid exchange of many voices, speaking both French and English, followed. Then, permission apparently in hand, the three younger girls took off at a near run for Baron’s box, Gabrielle in the lead. Their excited cries quickly blended with a series of yips, whines and low, loud barks. 

The mother, dressed like the father in well-worn khakis and a soft white cotton shirt rolled at the cuffs, was tall and slim and carried herself with the easy grace of an athlete. She wore brown leather thongs on her tanned feet and a straw hat partially covered pale blond hair tied up in a low, careless knot just at the nape of her neck. 

The two oldest girls, teenagers both, were still standing with the adults. Obviously their mother’s daughters, they easily matched her in height and build; broad shoulders swaying over narrow hips, long tanned expanses of slender, well-toned arms and legs revealed by their short skirts and sleeveless shirts. Their long, straight, light-brown hair was streaked nearly white in places by lengthy exposure in the sun.

The younger man was also about the same height as the older couple, but unlike the woman or her fair, laughing daughters, he was dark, wiry and intense looking. He wore his hair very short, and his thick, level brows matched his deep brown eyes. He was clean-shaven, but signs of a heavy beard shadowed his cheeks and jaw. Then he turned his head, and it was instantly obvious from his profile that he was the older man’s son. Like his father, he wore a light camp shirt with rolled sleeves and light colored trousers. He had no hat.

The woman squatted down to rummage through the various knapsacks. She twisted her head up to laugh at something the dark young man said to his father, showing a flash of white teeth. She grinned fondly at them both, the corners of her generous mouth curling up in a broad smile, before turning back to her task, which turned out to be finding extra clothes for her younger daughters. 

The three younger girls rejoined the party, Baron padding alongside. Baron was a giant, longhaired German Shepherd with a huge, dark head; almost large enough that Gabrielle could have ridden him like a pony. The volume of the group shot up as the three younger girls attempted to divert the attention of their parents away from their older siblings and toward themselves and their pet.

The woman rose to her feet, shrugged on a deep brown, many-pocketed jacket, and began distributing fleeces and leggings to her youngest children. She paused to help Gabrielle into hers, dropping a quick kiss onto her shiny curls before she straightened up. The man in white pulled on his own worn canvas coat and began ordering the distribution of the heap of packs and sacks. At his direction the dark young man, now wearing a heavy sweater and a scarf, went to get a luggage cart from a nearby stand and then collected Baron’s travelling box, stacking a few of the family’s smaller bags on top. Everyone else had just gathered up their remaining belongings and were preparing to move out, when a loud hail from further up the terminal startled them. 

“Nikita! Hiya, Nikita!”

A bald, barrel-chested man with sharp, dark eyes and a wide grin erupted out from the crowds. His deep maroon jacket was cut in a style better suited to a much younger man. Three beefy, pasty-skinned men in dark trousers and thigh-length leather coats, something faintly military in their rigid bearing and close-cropped hair, trotted at his heels.

“Nikita!” The man in the eye-catching maroon coat cried again, flinging his arms wide in welcome as he hustled toward the family, now gone wary and still. “Nikita, my Love! Doll face! I can’t believe we didn’t get here to meet you at the gate!”

*****

For a timeless moment, Nikita could only stand frozen, blinking madly to clear away the fantastic image of a long dead Mick Schtopel bearing down on them, three rent-a-goons trailing in his wake.

It was Michael who reacted first, putting himself between Mick and Nikita, his voice low and firm as he said, “empty your hands.”

After the briefest of stunned hesitations, they all moved rapidly. Nikita stepped up to stand at Michael’s shoulder. Nine-year-old Sophie pulled Gabrielle behind them, into the center of the loose ring formed by her older sisters and Adam. Fifteen-year-old Isabella was on their left, eleven-year-old Margaret to their right. Katherine, at thirteen nearly as tall as Isabella, fell in behind the little girls. Adam tugged Baron’s lead from Margaret’s hands and took up a point position between the strangers and his father, his fingers wrapped securely around the already growling Baron’s collar. As they moved, everyone adjusted their shoulder straps or dropped their bags to the ground, kicking them aside to clear their paths. 

Her adrenaline surging at the reality of a fast approaching Mick Schtopel, for unless ghosts were walking the streets of Paris in broad daylight it was definitely Mick Schtopel, Nikita firmly re-gathered her scattered wits and begin evaluating escape options. She knew if they could find an exit route, they had a good chance of making it. After a lifetime of travel through some of the world’s more dangerous places, their children had responded exactly the way she and Michael had taught them.

The quick rush of confidence steadied her just as Mick drew up in front of them. He kept a wary distance between himself and Baron. Baron was coiled on his haunches at Adam’s side, snarling and growling and clearly tensed for a chance to leap for the intruder’s throat.

“Well, well, well! Quite the family you have here, Nikita!” He glanced archly at Michael. “Your work, I presume?”

Michael didn’t dignify that with a response, so Mick sidled a bit until he was standing more or less directly in front of Nikita.

“Nikita, love! I know it’s been a long time, and we’ll have to have a coffee and catch up sometime soon – though I can see where you’ve put your time and energy, and to such fabulous effect too! Lovely girls. Lovely.” 

Mick paused briefly, casting such obviously calculating glances at Isabella and Katherine that Nikita had to stifle the urge to break his neck on the spot, but then Mick rushed on, “Ah, no time now! We must get you back to your perch, Operations.” Mick heavily underlined the word with significant nod in Nikita’s direction. “We require your immediate presence.”

Ignoring the way her heart rate spiked still further with that old title hanging in the air, Nikita just shook her head and said evenly, “I’ve already told the others they sent no. It won’t change just because you’re here,” she paused and raised her brow, “Marty.”

Mick frowned at her, but otherwise ignored her taunt. “Ah, but, my dear, the terms of your leave of absence were quite explicit.”

Nikita crossed her arms. “A lot changes in sixteen years. Obviously.” She nodded her head in the general direction of her daughters. “I’m not going back.”

“It’s yours. You have no choice.”

“No, it’s not, and yes, I do.”

“Well, you know, love, yes it is. It doesn’t properly belong to anyone else, you see, for you were the last to own it. It falls back to you now.”

“Come off it, Marty.” It was petty, but she did like the way the name seemed to make him flinch. “It’s been up and running for months. You don’t need me now. You never did.”

“Nikita. Please.” Mick abruptly changed tactics, adopting his best hangdog expression of charming desperation. The same expression he had once used to wheedle her into spending an entire evening with him, waiting for his – no doubt fictional – mother. “It’s very important that you come with us now.”

This time Michael said no.

Mick dropped his sad, pleading face and returned his hard, bright gaze to Michael. “Ah, old man, I know! Difficult to give up the little woman again, just because duty calls, ain’t it? But you’ll be wanting to keep this lovely covey of birds safe now, won’t you? Let me see if I’ve got all their names right, shall I? Isabella? Katherine? Margaret? Sophie?” 

Mick nodded at each of her daughters in turn. With each name, the heat from Nikita’s helpless fury that he should be here at all, much less threatening her children, spread further across her shoulders, then down her arms to the palms of her hands. Seemingly unperturbed by this, Mick ducked his head and waved cheerfully, “and is that little Gabrielle I spy? Hello my dear!”

Mick turned suddenly to stare at Adam. “And this young man must be Sala Vacheck’s grandson! Adam, yes? Don’t look much like your father do you? Must take after your mother’s people, hmm?”

Michael said, “Their names are widely known. Nikita can be of no use to you.”

Mick wagged his finger at Michael. “Once again, Michael, you and I are going to have to agree to disagree. For we need Nikita and none other.” Mick paused, as if debating with himself about what to say, then with a weary sigh and a tired shake of his head, he added, “and we may well need you too, before all is said and done, my old friend.”

Mick was quiet for a beat or two, staring at the ground and contemplating something none of them could see. But when he looked up, his bright smile was once again firmly in place. “Come on, come on! We need to go someplace calm and quiet to talk this through. Shall we leave? Please,” Mick raised his hands imploringly, and for one brief second, Nikita almost believed he was as genuine as he sounded, “let us have no unpleasant scenes?”

Nikita looked around once more, but seeing no avenue to safety, she opened her mouth to bargain with Mick, her compliance in exchange for her family’s escape, when another loud hail startled the little group. 

“Michael! Michael! Thank heavens we’ve found you! The traffic was unbearable!”

Out from the crowd behind Mick and his glowering assistants burst a gray-bearded Frenchman, short, stout and broad shouldered. His battered hat and well-worn hiking boots gave him the indefinable air of a man who had spent much of his lifetime out of doors. He rushed over to Michael’s side, crying as he came, “Michael, my friend! I am so sorry we are late! Had a bit more trouble with security than we expected. When was the last time that happened, eh?”

Michael took the man’s outstretched hand and said, “You’ve made it in time.”

Nikita nodded gratefully at J.B., recognizing him as a potential diversion, when five more men and women slipped quietly out of the crowd and took up positions around her family. These newcomers were all slimmer, younger, taller versions of J.B. Their work pants and worn boots also testified to long hours out of doors. Their lean, hard faces suggested something of the same military past as Mick’s beefy goons. But there was no appearance of uniformity in their street clothing, the hue of their skin, or their hairstyles, which ranged from bald through in-need-of-a-cut to dreads. Like J.B., all of these younger people were familiar to Nikita and she let herself relax, just a tiny bit, in relief. 

Michael and Mick exchanged a long cool stare, and then Mick dropped his head and opened his hands, conceding the moment with a light little laugh. “Well, Michael, it seems your formidable reputation as the director of security for Médecins Sans Frontières is as well deserved as was your previous one. You are one step ahead, as always. Perhaps we could arrange a meeting to discuss our needs later this evening, or tomorrow?”

Michael was silent for so long, Nikita wondered if he was going to deny Mick again and attempt to hustle them all out of the country. She knew it would never work, that there was no place to go and no place to hide, and she knew Michael knew the same. She was about to tell him so when he said, “Tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. My office.”

*****

They watched in silence as Mick and his goons exited the terminal. Then Nikita said, “Michael?”

He turned to look at her, his expression, even shadowed by his hat, grim. “Not here.”

Nikita swallowed her impatience and nodded. What they needed to discuss was really not something for the open terminal at Orly airport. Directing her gaze to J.B., she smiled warmly, “J.B. Thank you.” She turned her head to include all six newcomers in her smile. “Thank you all.”

J.B. waved his hand as though he were batting at a troublesome fly. “It was nothing, and we were almost too late – something for which I’m sure you will have harsh words later, eh, my friend?”

J.B. shot a quick grin at Michael, who rewarded this weak sally with a faint upward twitch of his lips. “Yes.”

“Come,” J.B. went on, barely daunted by Michael’s response. “We must get you out of here. I’ve got two vans, one for you, one for your baggage. Should’ve brought a third for Baron, here, yes? I’d forgotten just how huge that beast is!” He turned to give Baron a cheerful smile. “Like a tame bear or a small horse, you are!” 

J.B. laughed heartily at his own wit, and his warm deep rumble was like fresh breeze, blowing away the frozen tensions of the last few minutes. Everyone seemed to shake out their limbs, Gabrielle giggled, and even the usually serious Margaret smiled at J.B.’s teasing reference to her beloved pet.

“To baggage, then?” J.B. asked.

Michael nodded and the whole group, wary now and keeping their protective rings well in place as they moved through the halls, made their way down to where their baggage was travelling in an endless loop on a large, nearly empty carousel. The encounter with Mick had delayed them enough that most of the other passengers on their plane had claimed their bags and were making their way slowly through customs. The space around the carousel itself was now fairly open and their numerous items of luggage easy to spot.

Nikita stood a little way back, holding onto Sophie and Gabrielle’s shoulders. Margaret, who had regained Baron’s lead, stood with Nikita and the little girls, while Adam joined his father at the luggage carousel.

As Michael and Adam began heaving the large duffels onto the ground, Isabella and Katherine claimed some more empty luggage carts and pushed them over to begin loading them up. In a pause while they waited for more bags to reach them, Isabella, her voice clouded with worry, said, “Dad? What’s going on?”

Michael turned to look at his two oldest daughters, one nearly as tall as he was and the other who would be soon, and he smiled reassuringly. “Old business. Nothing you need to worry about.” 

Isabella crossed her arms and fixed her father with a rather hard stare. “Dad.”

Michael sighed, and then said, “This is not the place to explain. Be patient.”

He reached out and gently touched Isabella’s arm as they stood together in front of him, his expression serious as he looked back and forth between them. “We’re good at this. Your mother and I will take care of it.”

In Nikita’s opinion, Isabella and Katherine did not look fully convinced that this was so, but they both nodded and turned to seize more bags as they trundled by.

By the time sixteen large bags were pilled up on five carts, J.B.’s eyebrows had nearly disappeared under the rim of his hat. He glanced dramatically around the group and then said, in a tone of mock chastisement, “had it not been for the bully boys by the entrance, my friend, I would have suspected you of wanting nothing but porters today.”

Michael shrugged and adopted an expression of long-suffering, saying, as though it explained everything, “ les femmes.”

His three eldest daughters immediately cried, “Dad!” and Baron let out a low “woof!” at the noise.

Everyone laughed at that, even Michael managed a short-lived grin. Then their group headed for customs and their vans.

They were waved quickly through customs, national pride giving the French director of security for Médecins Sans Frontières something dangerously close to a free pass through French security. Normally this irritated Nikita and Michael both, as unbearably sloppy and unprofessional; today she had no quarrel with their speed.

It was only a short hike to the vans, for J.B. had managed to park unconscionably near the terminal, no doubt waving his MSF badge at everyone in sight. But again, as that had placed the vans under the steady surveillance of the Orly airport security as well as the two drivers, today Nikita was grateful for the privileges. Quickly flinging open the doors, three of J.B.’s squad filled one with their luggage while two others pulled out a small, battered pair of duffels and began discretely distributing handguns.

Sophie and Gabrielle regarded this development with unblinking calm, having traveled under armed escort most of their lives and hardly remembering the last time they lived in Paris. But Nikita saw that her three oldest daughters all immediately recognized the unusual nature of doing this here, in the heart of France. As she grimly accepted a gun herself, she saw their faces grow pinched with worry as they darted looks of increasing alarm back and forth among themselves.

J.B. asked, “Where to?” 

The whole party turned to look at Michael, waiting for his direction. Michael looked at Nikita, and she said, “Left Bank?”

Michael nodded and gave the drivers their instructions.

Nikita had been looking forward to getting resettled into their big, airy apartment, but she knew that it was now hopelessly compromised. They would probably have to give it up altogether because they would never be able get rid of all the spyware.

So, instead of heading home after a very long trip, they were off to find a small, randomly chosen hotel. They needed a secure location to figure out what had set Center on her back and to plot her escape, plot all of their escapes.

Seeing this exchange, Margaret cried in a voice full of shocked dismay, “we’re not going home?”

Nikita turned her head to look at her middle daughter. “No honey, we can’t. Not today.”

“But…but…I don’t understand!” she wailed, her pale gray eyes wide and suddenly glassy with angry, panicked tears.

Nikita exchanged a quick glance with Michael, who was already on the phone with someone, no doubt an informant of one sort or another, and she read his mute appeal to calm their middle daughter herself. Nikita looked at Sophie and Gabrielle. “Go get in the van, girls. Iz,” Nikita looked up, half in command, half appeal to her oldest daughter, “will help get you settled.” 

Seeing Isabella nod, Nikita released Sophie and Gabrielle and gave them a gentle push toward their sister. With the youngest girls moving obediently to Isabella’s outstretched hands, Nikita stood and turned to face Margaret.

*****

Dropping her arm across Margaret’s shoulders, Nikita pulled her around the end of the vans, where they could have a bit more privacy. Margaret had grown over the previous six months, and the top of her pale blond head reached just below Nikita’s shoulder. Despite the color of her hair and the sprinkling of freckles across her nose, Margaret of all their children most clearly took after Michael. Her hair, despite being blond, was thick and wavy like his, and she had his high broad forehead and long square chin under a beak of a nose, all still a little too large for her. She was a fit, active child, but Margaret also had Michael’s solid, muscular body-type, and it was already clear that her figure was going to be fuller than her older sisters’. So she would stand in front of mirrors along side Isabella or Katherine and announce that she was fat, fat, fat, and nothing could kill her notion that she was, as she had once phrased it to Nikita in a fit of agonized crying, a ‘bulldog in the middle of grey hounds.’ 

Out of compensation, or personality, or most likely some self-reinforcing combination of the two, Margaret had gravitated to a jocky, tom-boy presentation and even now was wearing faded jeans, beat-up sneakers and an old, washed-out, Real Madrid sweatshirt. She was an incredibly aggressive, talented football player and during their just-finished year in Cambodia had played on a boys’ team an age rank up from her own.

Of all her children, Margaret was the most easily thrown off balance by the unexpected, the one who most longed for what she called a “normal” life and most resented her family’s peripatetic journeys through the world’s worst trouble spots. When Margaret was eight, they had spent nearly a year in Paris and she had ever since looked back on this as a period of civilized sanity in an otherwise crazy universe. Her conversation for the last eighteen months had been so heavily peppered with the declaration, “this would never happen in Paris!” that even Michael’s near inexhaustible well of patience began to run dry and he actually interrupted her more than once before she could finish the sentence.

Ever since Mick’s departure a tendril of worry for Margaret’s reaction to their changed plans had been weaving through Nikita’s consciousness. Looking down now at Margaret’s furious scowl, that tendril burst into full, hideous flower. Nikita visualized Mick painfully dead on the side of a dark road, long ago and in a different place. It soothed her a little, even though it did nothing to relieve Margaret’s crushing disappointment or help them out of their current predicament.

When they reached an area of relative quiet, Nikita drew Margaret around in front of her, so she could look her in the eye. “I know how much you were looking forward to getting settled in our apartment. I was too! But right now it just isn’t a good place for us to be.”

Glowering, Margaret crossed her arms over her chest. “Why not?”

“Because we need to find a place where Dad and I can put our heads together, privately, and figure out what’s going on.”

“About that man.”

“Yes.”

Margaret frowned accusingly at Nikita. “Why does the Section want you back so badly?”

Nikita blinked in surprise that Margaret had put it all together so quickly. She said, “It’s not important now, because I’m not going back to work for them.”

“Why? Would it be so bad?”

Forcing down another rush of angry panic, Nikita replied as calmly as she could, “Yes, Margaret. It would. It would be very, very bad.”

Nikita nearly closed her eyes against the slight tremble of fright in Margaret’s voice when she asked, “Can he make you?”

She made her voice as firm and sure as years of training could make it. “We won’t let him.”

Margaret flicked her eyes to Nikita’s waistband, where Nikita had tucked away the weapon she had been handed. “Is that why you have a gun now?”

“Yes.”

Margaret dropped her gaze to her toes. When she looked up at Nikita, it was with eyes old beyond her years. “You can’t just say no and then we can all go home, can you?”

“I’ve already said no several times. He obviously doesn’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer. There is too much to explain and this isn’t the place. Margaret, I need you to be strong, because things are going to be pretty crazy for a while, for all of us. We need you to do exactly what we tell you, just as if we were in the bush, or in a war zone.”

“But, . . .but, Mom!” Margaret’s momentary flash of adulthood vanished. She waved a jerky hand around, taking in a wide circle around them, and said with a child’s incredulous anger, “this is Paris!” 

“I know, honey.” Nikita couldn’t help but chuckle a little at Margaret’s open resentment and shock, for a part of her felt exactly the same way. “I know. We are all just going to have to roll with it for a while.” She gripped Margaret’s shoulders reassuringly. “I know you can do that. Okay?”

Margaret thrust out her lower lip, but nodded, and with her voice breaking on swallowed tears said, “Yeah. I guess I can. I just… I wanted to go home, you know?”

Nikita pulled Margaret close and hugged her tight, resting her cheek against the top of Margaret’s head and whispering, “Yeah. I know. Me too.”

At first Margaret was rigid in Nikita’s arms, but after a few seconds she let go her tension and slumped against Nikita with a muffled half-sob, wrapping her own arms tight around Nikita’s waist in a return hug as fierce as it was desperate.

Margaret was just stepping back when Adam came round from the other side of the van. Catching Nikita’s eye, he offered her a quick reassuring smile before he turned his gaze to his sister. “Hey Maggie May. Would you come ride in the second van with Baron and me? He’s picked up on the tension and his growling is scaring Dad’s staff.” Adam sighed dramatically, “Again.”

Margaret smiled gratefully at Adam. “Sure. No problem!”

“We can check the football stats once we get going; yesterday’s results are all available now.”

“Awesome!” Margaret high-fived her brother, then vanished around the van in the direction Adam had come.

From the time he had offered to walk for hours, carrying a colicky baby in an infant sling and singing along with a staff member’s Rod Stewart tracks, Adam had shown a special talent for soothing Margaret. He’d been a gangly fourteen year-old then, and preferred comforting an infant to the comparatively far more exhausting task of chasing after then four year old Isabella and two year old Kate. Nikita knew that long, hot, humid summer in Thailand would have been far harder without his good-natured help. He was twenty-five now, but he still seemed to have a sixth sense for when Margaret needed a little extra attention. She said, “You’re an awesome big brother.”

Adam assumed one of his better smug expressions. “Yeah. I am.”

Nikita buffeted his shoulder. “Shall we discuss, again, the wisdom of telling ghost stories to Sophie right before bedtime?” 

“She asked!”

“Next time, I’m sending her to sleep with you in the middle of the night.”

“Okay. Next time!” Adam grinned again, then turned to follow Margaret.

“Adam?”

He looked back at her. 

“Thank you.”

He waved his hand at her and disappeared around the side of the van.

*****

Crawling into the seat Katherine had reserved for her a few moments later, Nikita looked around at the little girls as she pulled off her hat. Facing forward again, she said, “Michael? We need to stop for a meal as soon as we can.”

Michael, sitting in the middle of the first bench, his own hat now on the seat beside him, turned and looked back over his shoulder. His quick glance slid over their children’s strained faces before focusing on her. “Do you still have anything with you?”

“Only a few crumbled granola bars.”

Michael was silent for a moment, and then called out, “what would you like to eat?”

As one Sophie and Gabrielle began crying, “McDonalds’s! McDonald’s!”

Katherine scowled and said, “that’s not very French,” even as Isabella called from the back, “doesn’t matter to me, Dad. Whatever you think best.”

The chorus of “McDonalds’s!” reached a crescendo and Isabella reached over to ruffle Gabrielle and Sophie’s hair, hushing them softly as she did so. “McDonalds’s is fine, mom. Really.” 

After consulting the location finder on his phone, Michael said to the driver, “There is a McDonalds’s with an auto-window a few blocks out of our way.”

Sophie and Gabrielle cheered this declaration and Katherine sighed theatrically, though Nikita knew that with the unquenchable hunger of a thirteen-year old she would eat everything she asked for and more, if anyone else ordered more than they could eat. 

Michael sank back into his seat after giving the driver the exact address. Nikita leaned forward and clasped his shoulder, his flesh firm and comforting under her hand. She whispered quietly into his ear, “Thank you.”

She knew how much he detested the fast food chains, not only as an insult to local cuisine around the globe but also because as he’d inched deeper into his middle-fifties, he couldn’t tolerate it very well and it often made his stomach cramp up. It would also send the little girls into a salt and sugar high followed by a major crash, but the immediate calorie and carbohydrate injection would be worth it.

Michael reached up and put his hand over hers, pulling her fingers around so he could press a kiss against her knuckles. Turning his head slightly so he could look at her, he said, “It should entertain Mick.”

Nikita snorted despite herself. Wrapping her other arm around him, she squeezed his fingers and leaned her cheek against his; relishing as she always did the feel of his skin on hers, even with two day old stubble and the faintly sour smell of more than twenty-four hours of travel time behind them. In a voice only he could hear, she said, “You are a terrifying man and an excellent father.”

“Yes.”

Nikita hugged him tighter and kissed his jaw before whispering, “I love you.” 

Leaning back in her own seat, she scrabbled for pen and paper in her bag and then started taking food orders.

*****

Almost exactly nineteen years earlier, Nikita had said good-bye to Michael and Adam in a train station in Paris and watched them walk out of her life. At the time, she had been certain that if she ever saw either of them again, it would be decades into the future. She told herself it would have to be enough to have said ‘I love you,’ and heard Michael say the words in return, and known them to be true.

She had re-entered a Section in complete disarray, reeling from the loss of too much senior personnel in too short a time, and turning in on itself in a frenzied panic. So, just as Paul and Madeline had done after the disastrous theft of Section’s directory file in her first year as a probationary operative, and again after the destruction of their entire facility two years later, she focused on getting everyone moving as quickly as possible. She had Jason and Quinn comb the system for as many high-success missions as they could find, priorities be damned. They sent out their few fully functional teams and teams that were badly fractured by loss of both members and confidence, filling in new people as they finished their training, and recombining and closing and redefining substations as they went. Every team got twelve to twenty-four hours rest before she handed the team leaders new assignments, enough to recover physically, not enough to start thinking ahead.

Flash missions continued to crop up, of course, and Nikita regularly fielded hysterical demands from the latest Agency mouthpiece that she respond to some crisis situation or another. At first she had tried to actually achieve whatever outcome the Agency asked for. Sometimes things broke their way and the Section achieved closure, other times the hastily profiled, over-ambitious missions blew up in their faces.

Then one night, dragged from her bed by yet another exhausted Agency operative, she realized that they had no idea what outcome they wanted. They simply wanted a response, any response, to the situation. Armed with that insight, she had her profilers design flash missions that Section could accomplish, regardless of whether or not they addressed exactly whatever the Agency said they wanted. If anyone at the Agency noticed, no complaints ever made their way to her.

Gradually confidence and calm returned and within six months she was once again in a position to start thinking about priorities and long-term goals.

Only, she didn’t have any. Section was a hammer that pounded every nail it saw, but built nothing.

When she approached her senior contact at the Agency, wondering quite belatedly why Center had not yet offered any long-term policy guidance, she finally learned what had been keeping the Agency and Center in a state of chaos and producing its musical-chair leadership.

They were running out of money.

The primary backer of the Sections since their founding had been NATO, and at the heart of that, the United States. But the U.S., stung by the most dramatic instance of foreign terrorism on their soil in their history, and without the strong countervailing weight of confident and sure Agency leaders, was pulling in all its resources and circling the wagons. The then President and his advisors were determined to make their own decisions about their own security unhampered by what they perceived as the general spinelessness of their long-time allies; or hidden agencies over whom they had no direct control.

The Agency and the Sections were surviving only by raking up long lists of dead terrorists. Ironically, Nikita’s strategy to improve Section One morale by sending her operatives out to kill whomever they could kill successfully, as opposed to whomever might be most strategic or significant, had been all that was keeping the Agency’s funding intact.

Then the United States went to war in Iraq. The day Saddam Hussein was pulled out of a pit in the ground, unshaven and bewildered, Nikita retreated to her quarters and laughed until she cried and cried until she was sick, vomiting up all the anguish she had endured over Paul Wolfe’s efforts to hold back the darkness and save civilization by propping up another nasty, small-time dictator.

Civilization did not fall with Saddam Hussein.

But the Sections did. 

The U.S. government was desperate for cash to pay for their activities in the Middle East. The black money that had fed the Sections for decades was an obvious source of funds. Confident that their efforts had successfully shifted the mantle of fighting terrorism to their own shoulders, and in many distressing ways quite oblivious to the extent and reach of the Sections, the U.S. pulled the plug and the lights went out.

It hadn’t been quite that dramatic, of course. Nikita had been given almost a year to shut the Section down, successfully arguing, along with the heads at the Agency, Center and the other Sections, that simply vanishing would create too great a gap in global security, one that the U.S. was simply not yet ready to fill on its own.

At first she had been terrified that the Agency would demand that she exterminate everyone who had ever been a part of the organization, killing them off one by one as their jobs were eliminated. But they didn’t. She was told that it was entirely up to her how she closed the Section. At that point, those at the Agency hadn’t even wanted to know that they knew about the Sections and their work, much less that they knew what had happened to them.

Anxious for someone with more experience than she or Quinn or Jason had to bounce her ideas off of, she searched out Michael and asked him to review her plans.

It had taken almost an entire precious month to find him, and when she eventually did she was shocked to the core and yet, in some way utterly unsurprised. He was in the hell that was Liberia in those years, in Monrovia, providing security for the intrepid volunteers working for the Medicines Sans Frontiers hospital there. To her outraged dismay, he even had Adam with him. When she demanded to know what possessed him to endanger Adam like that, he told her he owed a debt to the director of the hospital, and was now in a position to pay it back. He also informed her that Adam was better off with him regardless of where, than alone with strangers, even in a safe place.

Michael had refused to come to her and abandon the responsibilities he had taken on, so she took a security team and went to him.

Over the course of two long days they refined and solidified her plans for closing down Section One and re-integrating as many operatives as they could into the outside world.

She had wanted desperately to spend the one night with him, in his bed and in his arms, but been afraid to ask after their first, very public, meeting. She had flung her arms around him, so glad to see him alive and well and healthy in front of her she wanted to laugh with joy despite the place and the circumstances. He had returned her embrace, but with enough hesitation and surprise that she had not been certain if he was being polite or if he really wanted to hold her. She did go a little glassy eyed, from embarrassed relief, and from overwhelming lust, when he held out his hand to take her to his quarters at the end of that first, long day.

In the deep black night of a city without power, wrapped tightly in each other’s arms despite the heat, they also made whispered plans and promises about her future, about their future.

While she had to make various adjustments to her profiles as a result of circumstance and better information, the framework she had prepared with Michael’s help stood the test of time, dictating almost all of her actions over the next ten months.

The Agency was also shutting down, so, much to her satisfaction, she heard very little from them over that time period. She was only weeks from walking away forever when they asked her to come in again. It was at that meeting that she learned that the Agency, once again, had new leadership and as a result, once again, had changed course. It wasn’t shutting down so much as it was going dark; they were planning to keep the Agency alive by hibernating with a skeleton staff, ready and waiting to be revived when the world changed again.

Her superiors had informed her that she was to consider herself on leave, not released, from her position as Operations, and the last thing they wanted from her was a plan to restart the Sections if that time ever came. Disappointed, but too exhausted by the demands of trying to meet the same threats with ever fewer resources to be surprised, Nikita had complied – drawing up plans that relied on Section hardware and installations and ideal operating conditions, but required entirely new personnel. She submitted her plans believing that they would be ignored when the time came, and determined that she would have no part of some re-booted Section One.

With the Sections closed and most of their old opponents fully occupied by playing cat and mouse with U.S. intelligence and military operations, Nikita hugged Walter, Jason and Quinn goodbye, then booked a ticket under her own name and flew directly to Michael’s side.

*****

By the time Nikita joined him, Michael was no longer in Monrovia. The intervening months had seen some improvement in Liberia’s stability, and with a solid team in place there, Michael had moved on. He was overseeing security for MSF hospitals in Afghanistan and Iraq. Both countries were in a state of near total breakdown then, and various factions struggling to gain a hold in the post-Hussein Middle East increasingly came to view aid workers as acceptable targets. Because MSF and other humanitarian agencies and personnel were being explicitly targeted in Iraq and Afghanistan both, MSF leadership had contacted Michael directly and asked him to do for their facilities there what he had done on an independent basis for the director of the hospital in Monrovia.

Nikita found the irony of the two of them – of all people – taking part in attempting to reconstruct Iraq painfully funny, and at the same time deeply significant. In the few quiet times during the frantic months of closing the Section, she had considered her own future and she had decided that Michael’s work with MSF was an omen. She would put aside killing in favor of healing, slowly earning her way to redemption with every life she helped patch back together. There was really no more satisfying place to begin that task than Iraq. That every day, and every small success, felt like a quiet ‘up-yours’ to Paul and Adrian both, was just that little extra zing that made every task a little bit sweeter still.

Despite the very real dangers and too many heartbreaking losses, Nikita loved the first years they spent with the MSF. She threw herself into the work at the MSF hospitals, doing everything from cleaning floors to bookkeeping. She eventually focused her attention on nursing, training by mail and by internet and under the supervision of the professionals on the staff. Quite serendipitously she also became involved with some United Nations sponsored initiatives addressing women and children. With time, she found ways to combine her interests by focusing on public health policy and preventative care.

During those years people she met often asked her why she didn’t go to school and pursue a degree in her field, but this option had never appealed to her. She couldn’t imagine why she should want to leave Michael and Adam to go to school, and said so. Having, by an utterly unexpected twist of fate, the opportunity to live openly and freely with the partner she loved was a gift too precious to ever abandon, no matter how noble the goal.

She and Michael married within days of her arrival, in an untended garden in full bloom under a bright afternoon sun. Cliché though it was, it was the happiest day of her life. 

And the nights, the long hot nights when they discovered and rediscovered the joy they found in each other, kept them both on a sex-fueled high that lasted for months, up through the birth of their first child and beyond.

Nikita also learned, to her delighted surprise, that she relished being pregnant. In the bad years at Section, she had both loved and deeply resented her body. Madeline’s welcome to Section made it clear to Nikita that she was initially valued for her body alone, recruited for it alone, as if it was a thing separate from herself, and she had blamed it for trapping her in the Section. And Section used her body. If she never, ever again heard the phrase “he has a weakness for tall blondes,” it would be too soon. It would never compensate for all the humiliating and degrading things she had been asked to submit to in the pursuit of the Section’s agendas, or the contempt she had learned to feel for the appetites of men.

At the same time, she had loved her body. She was tall and strong and supple and even in the intensely macho environment of the Section, with speed and skill and talent on her side she was more than a match for any operative there. Over the years she had honed her body with constant and intense exercise, finding peace in the physical exhaustion itself and security in knowing she was a formidable athlete at the peak of her form. 

In Iraq she discovered that her body was far more remarkable that she had ever imagined. Watching herself grow and change in the mirror, free from any morning sickness and feeling the first faint stirring and, later, the determined thumping of new life inside her was the most fascinating, most powerful thing she had ever experienced with her body. It also left her feeling unbelievably aroused, literally bursting with life; feelings Michael supported and encouraged with abandon.

She once teased him about keeping his pregnant-lady kink a secret from her, and he smiled his slow, sweet smile and told her he hadn’t known he had one until now, until her, and she thought she might well die from loving him so much. Only to learn the spring following her arrival in Iraq, when she stared into the tiny face of her newborn daughter, that she had never known what it was to fall headlong, permanently, unquestioningly, and forever in love.

The only dark cloud over those first years was Adam. When she joined them in Iraq, Adam was a wary, quiet nine-year old, clinging to his father as the only rock in his unstable world. It proved quite difficult for him, and for Michael, dealing with his own issues of guilt and regret and fear, to let a new person into their relationship. Nikita finally decided, difficult as it was for her to do, that the only way she could make headway with Adam, and through him Michael, was by backing off and proving as stable and reliable as his father was. The first time Adam hugged her of his own accord, more than a year and a half after she and Michael married, was moment of triumph forever engraved on her heart.

Once begun, their family grew steadily in the years that followed. This was a source of great happiness and sometimes burning frustration for Nikita. They moved regularly as Michael acquired ever-greater responsibilities within MSF for protecting and securing their humanitarian and relief efforts world wide, making it difficult for her to give her own work the attention it deserved and at the same time, meet their own needs, or those of their children. She and Michael had decided early on that ten days – a compromise number resulting from many heated discussions – was the longest either of them would travel away from the family, and that one of them would always be with the children. If he needed more time to inspect various MSF missions or to establish a new one, they all went with him. If she needed more than ten days to attend training or conferences, once again, the whole family came. This kind of mobility made pursuing her own work so difficult that she came close to simply giving it up more than once, only to have Michael convince her not to, and to redouble his own efforts to help her maintain her own career.

For many years, they also had to deal with the challenge of long-time MSF workers who resented the need for armed security, and as a result, resented Michael and Nikita. They viewed armed guards as a nearly mortal affront to the very humanitarian impulses and principles that created their organization in the first place. At the same time they had thought Michael and Nikita recklessly oblivious to real danger as they carted their young family around to many of the world’s most damaged locations. Michael had responded to both sets of criticisms with a raised brow, a cool stare, and a roll of his shoulders.

It had been up to Nikita to explain to their critics that they felt more secure if they were all together, regardless of the circumstances, and that a gun was no more and no less a tool than a scalpel, and increasingly just as vital to the work MSF was doing. She left it to them to work out for themselves that a chief of security who traveled with child seats in his Land Rover was maybe not so far removed from their core mission as they feared. Eventually, MSF staff and volunteers had made their peace with Michael and his teams, and found it in their hearts to embrace his children. One unexpected consequence of this was that in many ways their children were being raised in the midst of an extremely large extended family of interventionist-minded adults, something that had resulted in turning them into worldly wise, sophisticated, and generous busybodies. They never met a problem for which they couldn’t think of a solution, and Michael and Nikita had long since grown used to having the family pulled into one adventure or another through the earnest efforts of one of their children to live up to the ideals of the adults around them. 

It had been, for her and for Michael, a remarkable life. It wasn’t conventional; they had never owned a mini-van, or a house with a picket fence, or a dog as harmless as a cocker spaniel, but they had been together. They had children of their own. They had found a way put their skills and their knowledge to work saving every life they could.

It was a life that Nikita was determined to protect with every resource she could command.

*****

Less than two hours after Mick Schtopel walked out of the past and into Orly Airport, Nikita stood in the lobby of a small, left bank hotel. She was overseeing the delivery of more computer equipment. They had chosen the hotel at random, based on the combination of layout, size, location and the willingness of the owner to throw out his two sets of guests and (for a generous fee) turn the entire facility over to them. 

They were setting up a communications center in the main sitting room; J.B. and a team of Michael’s operatives from MSF were already working the phones and the computers. Their goal was to put together anything and everything they could find that might help them figure out what Mick and the Agency wanted so very urgently from her and, apparently, her alone at this particular time and place. 

Almost nine months earlier a man claiming to be a representative of the Agency had contacted her, asking her to resume her job as Operations and restart Section One. She had laughed in his face, told him no, and walked away. For several weeks she had heard nothing more, but then a different man approached her in different place with the same request. She turned him down and told Michael that the Agency was back in the Section business.

After that they had both spent time raking their sources trying to figure out why, even if someone was finally putting the Sections back online, they should want her, now. She was more than fifteen years out from that world and, moreover, had cultivated innumerable ties and obligations and a public persona that made disappearing into the daily operations of the Section completely untenable. They had hit blank wall after blank wall even as they eventually found hints, here and there, that the Sections were already operational and running live missions. Which meant they were up and functioning without her. At that point they had sat back, watching and waiting to see what else might happen. And then, nothing. Not for nearly six months. Until today.

Some piece of information they did not have, some key to the puzzle that would help them make sense of the sudden panic to claim her was still missing. So they were once again searching everywhere, calling everyone they could think of who might be able to help, no matter how tangentially related to what and who they had been in their Section lives, and in all the years since. 

The young woman posted in the lobby opened the front door to yet another arrival, and Nikita smiled in relief. “Took you long enough.”

“I was busy.”

Nikita grinned wider and shrugged. “You could have said no.”

Quinn folded her arms and raised her brow. “You don’t have anyone else to call.”

“You don’t even like children.”

“No. I don’t. Thank God you got fixed and quit spawning after five.”

“I liked being pregnant.”

“Give it up, already. You’re never going to convince me that playing host to a parasite you have to squeeze out your twat after nine months of hell is fun.”

“Well…”

“And if you tell me about Michael’s pregnancy kink one more time I swear to God I’m walking right out that door and never looking back.”

“You have no poetry in your soul.”

“You’re a romantic, breeding sap.”

Nikita stepped into Quinn’s arms and hugged her hard. She whispered, “Thank you.”

Quinn returned her embrace, fierce and short, like always, and then stepped back. “Where are the kids?”

“Upstairs.” Nikita crossed to the staircase and yelled up to the next floor, “Girls? Quinn’s here.”

Running footsteps and excited shrieks converged overhead and in seconds Quinn was fully occupied trying to fend off five different girls all trying to hug her at once. 

Nikita smiled at the commotion, made worse when Baron started barking. Once the noise eased, Nikita said, “Come on. Let’s go show Quinn where we’ve gotten you all set up.”

The girls and Quinn were already on the stairs when sound of Michael’s voice from the door to the lounge stopped her. “Nikita. We’re ready.”

“Michael, I’ll just be a minute.”

“No. Now.”

From halfway up the stairs, Quinn drawled, “Hi Michael. Nice to see you too.”

Michael looked up at her. “Hi. Thanks for coming so quickly.”

Quinn put her hand on her hip and pointed at Michael, pinning him with sharp glare. “You owe me. Big time.”

Michael smiled in acknowledgement as he nodded. “Yes.” Michael looked at Nikita. “Nikita.”

Nikita exchanged a long look with him, and then sighed. “Okay.” Looking up at Quinn she forced a smile. “You guys be good. We have the run of the place, but I’m sure the little girls are going to crash soon.”

Quinn nodded back. “We’ll be fine. Don’t worry about us.”

Nikita held Quinn’s gaze until Quinn raised her brows, rolled her eyes in exasperation, shook her head and turned to follow the girls.

*****

Climbing the stairs Quinn reminded herself, for approximately the one-hundredth time in the last ten hours, that she was a determinedly, blissfully child-free woman of a certain age, with significant accomplishments and considerable professional success. She possessed highly sought after skills and knowledge, and was exceedingly well paid for her time as a result. So, given all that, she asked herself, again, how the hell had she ended up so thoroughly entangled with traveling road show that was the Wirth-Samuelle household? How had she become their go-to babysitter in time of crisis? She didn’t even like kids!

She knew the answers perfectly well, of course. It all began the day she dreamed up the wild notion that she could play Nikita, brand new Operations of Section One, the same way she had played Paul Wolfe. She would seduce her, and then worm her way from Nikita’s bed and into her confidence. She would offer her acidic, chatty self as a bracing antidote to Michael Samuelle’s glowering, emo charms, and her skills as assets to be bargained with and for. 

Her handlers had thought she was crazy, that Nikita was completely heterosexual and, more to the point, totally committed to Michael. Quinn disagreed. She had suspected for some time that Nikita had an unexplored interest in women as well as men, and she reminded her handlers that Nikita had fooled Michael as thoroughly as she had fooled Paul and Madeline. She blithely assured them that she would be offering Nikita exactly the type of sexual adventure Nikita craved, while providing her with a simulacrum of the female friendship she so pathetically desired. Her rapid success seemed to confirm everything Quinn had thought she knew and understood about the untried and undeserving young woman who had inherited a position earned the hard way by more talented predecessors. 

It took her six and a half weeks to realize just how thoroughly she’d been swallowed by her own hubris. Nikita had used the affair to gain access to nearly all of Quinn’s files. From them, she had learned the names and extent of Quinn’s ties into Center personnel. Something Quinn discovered the day all her contacts disappeared in an internal purge, orchestrated by Nikita’s sister and uneasy ally, Michelle Jones. 

Quinn had expected to be eliminated immediately herself. Instead, Nikita had offered her the position as second in command that she had been angling to secure. When Quinn asked her why, Nikita shrugged and said, “You’re obviously well qualified for the job.” 

Then she’d asked Quinn out for dinner. 

Curious, Quinn had accepted, half believing that it was merely the traditional last meal served to the condemned. It was, in a way. As they sat over their wine and desert, Nikita cocked her head, looked Quinn over very carefully, and observed, “You were angling to fill a number of positions in my life.”

After carefully swallowing a non-existent sip of coffee, she had said, “Yes.”

“Other than my second, are you actually interested in any of those other roles?”

Quinn had said yes, of course she was. 

Nikita laughed. “You really don’t have to say that. You have the job as second either way.”

Of course Quinn had insisted that no, really, she was interested in exploring the more personal relationship they had begun. What choice had she had? To back off at that point would have been to be cut completely out of Nikita’s inner circle. With her contacts at Center eliminated, she would be truly out in the cold.

Nikita shook her head, almost as if in regret. “Quinn,” she’d said, “you’ve read my files. Being my lover is a dangerous, and probably disastrous, career move. Look at what happened to Michael.”

All idiotic bravado, Quinn had said, “I’m not Michael.”

Their affair resumed more or less as if nothing had happened. By the time their first year in charge was over, Quinn realized that she was no longer pretending to like or respect Nikita. By the time they learned that the Sections were being closed, she hoped they were really friends, as much as they could be, in the context of the Section.

Nikita really was an extremely talented cold-op and team leader, and she really was a nudgey do-gooder with a massive problem with authority, just as her files said. But her files hadn’t revealed her warmth, or her empathy, or her charisma, all of which made her a commander of considerable talent and charm. Nor had the files captured her full capacities for ruthlessness and duplicity; or her deep and biting cynicism for the Section, its mission, and its overseers, and, most especially, for herself as their handmaiden. They had also been quite silent on just how very good Nikita was at sex.

All of which meant Quinn had needed to spend some hard time looking into her own heart and mind when, after learning they might escape the Sections instead of dying in them, Nikita returned from her flying visit to Michael almost literally shedding light as she strode through Section One’s cold corridors, unable to banish her tiny smile of boundless, private joy. The realities of the Section ended that phase soon enough, but it brought on a welter of confusing emotions that it had taken Quinn some time to sort out. Eventually she had decided that she clearly wasn’t jealous of Michael Samuelle, exiled former contender for the top job, she was merely envious of her friend’s excitement about the future. And that, unlike jealousy, was something that Quinn had been able to acknowledge and deal with.

As it turned out, she had not sailed so far up the river of denial that there was no hope of return. 

A few months before they walked out for good, Nikita had rolled over on to her side, propped her head on her hand, and said, “Would you be interested in bringing this relationship into our new lives?”

Quinn had felt her heart leap with what, after almost three years of constant exposure to Nikita, she was prepared to call personal happiness.

And that was why, now, when the Section had returned, zombie-like, from the dead to hunt Nikita down, Michael and Nikita had turned to her to watch over their daughters.

*****

Quinn followed the sound of the girls’ voices into a large, front-facing guest room. When she walked in the voices stopped and, to her very mild surprise, the girls were ranged around the room in a semi-circle, clearly waiting to interrogate her. Gabrielle and Sophie were sitting on the big bed, Margaret at the small table in front of the window. Isabella and Katherine, twin sentinels, were standing facing the door, their arms crossed and grim expressions in their light blue eyes, cool and appraising under their father’s level, dark brows. They looked so much alike, and were such close friends, it was often hard to remember that they were quite different from one another in temperament and taste. Isabella had been a serious, thoughtful, book-reading child and was a serious, responsible teen. Kate was louder, and more social, making friends easily and preferring movies and music to reading.

Isabella spoke. “It’s bad, isn’t it.” She made it a statement, not a question.

Quinn nodded. “Yes.”

“Do you know what it’s all about?”

“The past. The Section.”

“Is mom in trouble?” That was Margaret.

“She’s in danger, not in trouble.”

Sophie piped up, an anxious frown marring her pretty little heart-shaped face. She had green eyes and dark brown curls, and an unquenchable love for dresses, jewelry and nail polish. She asked, “Then why is dad mad at her?”

“He isn’t. He’s just really focused right now on saving her from whatever it is, reaching out to try to take her from him. He’s really obsessive that way. Fanatical even.” 

Quinn stopped herself before she went even further, words like ‘insane, freakish, terrifying’ trapped safely behind her teeth.

“What are they doing downstairs?”

“He’s about to put your mom through her most intensive debrief in nearly twenty years. It’s going to take a long time.”

Katherine interrupted, her expression hard and a little angry. “She didn’t do anything wrong!”

“No.” Quinn really hoped this was true. “It’s just that whatever started this, it’s from a long time ago. Details are important, but much harder to recall with accuracy.”

“Mom wouldn’t hold out on him!”

Quinn sighed. “If your dad handed your mom a knife and asked her to open her own veins, she’d do it. Just because he asked. She’d bleed out believing he had a good reason for her sacrifice. But...” 

Quinn trailed off, not sure if she could ever put it into words, words that someone who had never been there would ever be able to understand, much less a bunch of kids born long afterward.

“But...?” Isabella prompted.

“But – we all learned, in a hard school, to keep secrets. To tell lies. It’s, like breathing. Easier even, and sometimes just as unconscious.” Quinn smiled then and walked into the room, tossing her bag on the bed and plopping down between Sophie and Gabrielle. “Your mom will do her best, which is always very, very good. And while we wait, you’re going to fill me in on the last nine months.” Quinn looked around at the worried faces of the five clever offspring of Michael Samuelle and Nikita Wirth, and she grinned. “Now. Enough with the worry. Tell your auntie Quinn. What mischief have you all gotten up too lately?”

*****

Four hours later one of Michael’s people summoned her downstairs. Quinn found Nikita in the small dinning room, leaning back in one chair and her feet propped in another, long legs stretched out in front of her and a wet cloth over her eyes.

“Why do you let him do that to you?” she asked.

Nikita answered without moving. “Michael didn’t do anything to me. Paul and Madeline fucked me over with their fucking mind-rape bullshit twenty years ago. I’m just still paying.”

Quinn pulled out a chair at the same table and sat down. “Wow. Now I know your head hurts. You don’t usually have such a potty mouth.”

“I’m seeing double.”

“He should have stopped the debrief hours ago then.”

“And picked it up, when?”

Quinn frowned and didn’t answer, knowing as well as Nikita did that there was no more ‘when’ to wait for. After a minute or two she asked, “Did you turn up anything?”

“Narrowed it down.” Nikita pulled the cloth off her eyes and sat up a bit so she could look at Quinn without craning her neck. Her face was pale and drawn, and her eyes red-rimmed and watering with pain. “It has to be something from the years at Section One after I was level two and before you and Jason got there. But we still can’t pinpoint what. And it feels like we’ve excluded everything.” 

Quinn could hear all of Nikita’s exhausted frustration in her low, raspy voice. “Why just those few years?”

“Before that I was too junior to know much of anything not also known by lots more people than me, and no one has contacted you or Jason.”

“I know. I called him after Michael called me. We’ve heard nothing, even though we’ve both caught the traces of the rebooted operation. I know he told Michael the same thing. Which also definitely means Section One, and not Center or Oversight.” Quinn hesitated a moment, then asked, “Did either of you call Michelle?”

“I did. She says she’s heard nothing.”

“Which she’d say, true or not.”

“Yes.” 

“How did Michael know something was going to happen today?”

“Apparently the new Section leaks as badly as the old one. Rumor got to one of the Uzbek mafia-types MSF has to deal with, and yesterday he actually gloated to Michael over the phone that some big bad was coming to steal his woman.” 

“I see.”

After another short silence, Nikita asked, “How are the girls?”

“Worried. But, for now, asleep. And you were right; Sophie and Gabrielle were out before eight. Took the big girls a bit longer and a really stupid movie for them to fade.”

“It’s a long trip. And the roads in Cambodia still suck.”

Michael walked in then, carrying a glass of water, which he set down at Nikita’s elbow, and a pill package. Seeing him opening it, Nikita said, “I already said no, Michael.”

He answered, his voice soothing, “It’s over the counter migraine medicine, nothing more.”

Nikita closed her eyes and said, “Quinn?”

Quinn held out her hand and raised her brows, waiting. After a minor staring contest, Michael sighed quietly and handed her the pills. After examining them, Quinn said, “He’s lying. It’s your prescription stuff.” Responding to the plea she’s seen in his eyes, she went on, overriding Nikita’s objection, “but he’s right. You need to take them.”

“I hate them. They make me loopy.”

“Which is worse than the seeing double, blinding-pain thing, how, exactly?”

Nikita scowled and then held out her hand for the pills, tossing them back with the water and a heavy, resigned sigh.

Michael put his hand on Nikita’s shoulder. To Quinn he said, “Thank you.” He gently brushed Nikita’s hair back from her forehead. “I’m running a bath for you. Come on.”

Nikita put her hand on his for a moment, then, leaning heavily on both Michael and the table for support, pulled herself to her feet and headed for the lobby stairs.

Michael looked at Quinn. “Would you look over the notes?”

“Of course.”

“Adam has them.”

Quinn barely controlled her gasp of surprise. She was pretty certain her eyebrows flew up to her hairline anyway. “Adam?”

“Schtopel ID’d him as Sala Vacheck’s grandson in the middle of Orly airport today. At this point further ignorance is deadlier than more knowledge.”

*****

When Nikita was half way up the stairs she spotted Isabella and Katherine waiting for her. They were sitting on the top steps and leaning against the wall, just out of sight of the main lobby. She slowed to a stop and looked at them carefully, straining hard against the pain in her head to focus her vision. Her reward for this effort was to see clearly the stress and worry in their expressions. “Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”

“That’s what we want to know,” Isabella replied.

Nikita countered, “Quinn told me you were asleep.”

Katherine smirked. “Quinn isn’t always as hard to fool as she thinks she is.”

Isabella rolled her eyes. “You were so snoring during the movie.”

Katherine stared down the bridge of her nose, Samuelle hauteur rolling off her in waves. “Fake snoring. Obviously fooled you too.”

Nikita decided her head still hurt too much for thinking up clever, and true, misdirection. She sat down heavily on the step across from Izzy and Kate. “Alright. What do you already know?” she asked.

Isabella said, “Only that something from the past, from Section One, has started up again and somehow you’re involved, and you and dad and the rest are trying to figure out what, so you can get away from it.”

Nikita nodded. “More or less, yes.”

“Did you figure it out?” Katherine asked.

“No.” Nikita sighed. “We’ve narrowed it down, but mostly all we’ve been able to do is exclude every possibility we’ve thought of so far.”

Isabella asked, “So, what can we do?”

Nikita looked up at her clever, beautiful daughters and fought back overwrought tears. Tall and slim, they looked more like her than like Michael, with upturned noses and big, bright blue eyes. The only sign of their paternity, in their faces anyway, was their dark, level brows, and something about their high cheekbones, especially in Isabella’s slightly longer, slightly narrower and flatter bone structure. What they both had, and that had definitely come from their father, was an incredible natural assurance. In her own troubled youth, Nikita had made do with bravado and defiance, but her oldest daughters, at least, walked through the world as though it had been made just for them. So far anyway, the world seemed to agree. 

She looked down at her hands, unable to meet their eyes any longer. She answered Isabella’s question, “We keep gathering intel, and in the meantime take steps to keep us all safe.”

Looking back up again, she remembered that defiance could sometimes hold long enough for a better plan to come along. “We also fight them at every turn, using every tool we have.”

“How does trapping us upstairs with Quinn do that? We could help you!” Isabella said, as Katherine exclaimed, “Whatever it takes mom. We have your back.”

Nikita felt her heart swell with a familiar wave of love and pride and general amazement how much she adored her children. She smiled what she suspected had to be a watery smile, Quinn would have called it inanely sappy she was sure, and gripped Kate’s knee. “Thanks, honey. I know you do. As for why you were upstairs,” she looked at Isabella, “partial knowledge can actually be more dangerous than none. Today we didn’t have the time to give you all the background you would need to make sense of the details we were working with tonight. I know – trust me, I know! – It is incredibly frustrating to be kept in the dark for your own good. I promise that we will make the time as soon as we can to tell you as much as you want to know.”

Izzy said, “Like, for example, who is Sala Vacheck?”

Nikita exhaled sharply. “See – that’s what I mean about partial knowledge. We are almost one hundred percent certain that, at this moment, Sala Vacheck has nothing to do with what’s happening. For one thing, he’s been dead for more than twenty years.”

“Then why did that man bring him up?”

“Mick. The man’s name is Mick Schtopel. He was reminding us that even though he couldn’t drag me back to Section One today, he can still hurt us if we don’t make some effort to negotiate with him. He could also, he thinks, stir family turmoil by bringing up your dad’s past.”

“What about my past?” Michael came up the stairs, stopping just below where they were sitting. 

“Who is Sala Vacheck?” Kate asked this time, her gaze darting back and forth between her parents.

Nikita looked up at Michael, waiting for him to take the lead. He said, “You know the story of how I came to meet and marry Adam’s mom, Elena?”

“Yeah.” Katherine frowned. “You married her as part of a mission to get to her father.”

“Yes.” Michael hesitated, then, after a quick glance at Nikita, went on, “Sala Vacheck was her father.”

“Why does anyone care now?” Isabella asked.

Michael said, “His nephews have rebuilt much of his old organization. They could be persuaded to see Adam as a threat to their power.”

Isabella rolled her eyes. “Because terrorism is hereditary, now?”

“No more than any other family business, but no less.” Nikita shook her head, then hissed because it made the world wobble a bit. “Anyway, it was a warning, not a statement of anything that has actually happened. Yes,” she held up her hands, “we’ve checked. And re-checked.”

“Your head hurts,” Katherine said.

“Yes.”

“Mom?”

“It’s just stress.” Nikita took the hand Michael offered her and pulled herself to her feet. “Really. Stress headache, nothing more. Tomorrow is likely to be a very crazy day, so you should really try to get to sleep. Come on.” She gestured toward the upstairs hall with her hand and smiled at them. “Do you want to be tucked in?”

They both rolled their eyes as they filed past her and down the hall, but neither of them objected when she slipped into the room they were sharing with a sleeping Margaret a few minutes later, after checking on Sophie and Gabrielle. She pulled the covers up over their shoulders and kissed their foreheads. “Sleep well. I love you,” she whispered, and they whispered back, “We will, we love you too.”

*****

Nikita closed the bathroom door and sagged against it, watching impassively as Michael zipped his fly and reached to flush the toilet. Over the noise of the rushing water, Nikita said, "Did I pass your test? Was I truly shocked by the reappearance of Mick Schtopel?"

Michael finished washing his hands and toweled them dry, then looked up and fixed her with a level gaze. “Yes.”

Nikita tried to muster a blistering glare, but her vision was still fuzzy on the edges and Michael didn’t even blink. She suspected the result was closer to a tired pout. “Why did you bring us back here? We were still in Bangkok and had almost four hours to change plans after you got your tip.”

"If they are determined to speak with you they will – in Paris we have resources as well."

“We have resources lots of places, some of them much further from the Agency than here.”

“Only they have the information we need.”

“You still should have told me.”

“Why?”

“So we could have decided together what to do? So I could have come alone?”

“Obviously, you do know why I didn’t tell you.”

“Michael…” She trailed off, sighing, realizing that there was nothing else to be said.

After a moment, he offered, “Your bath is ready.”

Nikita looked over at the ancient claw footed bath, long and deep, then she looked back at Michael. “It looks like the one in your old apartment.”

“Yes. I thought so.”

After a pause she said, “There’s room for two.”

“Yes.”

“Will you stay?”

“If that’s what you want.”

Nikita stepped close to him, slipping her fingers inside the waistband of his trousers and pressing her cheek against his as she spoke softly into his ear. “Yes. That’s what I want.”

Folding his arms around her, Michael murmured, “We should plan for tomorrow’s meeting. And then you need to sleep.”

She closed her eyes and let Michael take more of her weight as she relaxed into him. “Yes. And you should sleep too.”

Michael brought up his hands to tangle in her hair as he pressed his lips to her forehead, then her cheeks, then to her mouth.

She had to swallow to speak; even then her voice was a dry husky shadow as she asked, "What approach do you think they’ll use?"

"More of what Mick tried today, pressing on your old ‘leave of absence’ and demanding your compliance."

"And no information until I offer it.”

“No.”

“So, I lie, they lie, and at some point they will have to get bored and tell me what they want from me.”

Finished with unbuttoning her shirt, Michael slipped it down off her arms, trailing his fingers along the skin on the inside of her elbows and staring at her lips. “Yes.”

After shaking her hands free from her shirtsleeves, Nikita ran them gently over his shoulders and down across his chest, slipping her hands under his sweater and smiling when she felt his hiss in the contraction of his abdominal muscles. “Then, that’s our plan. Wing it once we have more intel.”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” She nodded and reached for his belt buckle.

*****

Nikita stretched her back as she wiggled down against Michael’s chest, seeking a more comfortable position. The tub was shorter but wider than one Michael had once had, and it was nice and deep. The hot water and Michael’s strong fingers had washed away the grime of travel and the drugs were working and her brain no longer felt like it was trying to explode out her eye sockets. Breathing deeply she closed her eyes and said, “I had started to believe this day would never come.”

Michael was skimming his fingers gently across her shoulder. “I know.”

“You never did.”

“No.”

“How worried are you?”

Michael breathed deeply for a heartbeat or two, and then he said, “Let’s not talk about it now.”

Nikita thought about that for a moment, then twisted her neck so she could look up into Michael’s face. “What should we do instead?”

His answer was a kiss, followed by his hands running along her sides under the water, slick and sure as he reached for her inner thighs. He pulled her legs up and open, shifting his legs underneath hers at the same time, using his knees to trap her legs against the hard, smooth surface of the tub walls. Nikita made a sound caught somewhere between a smothered laugh and erotic moan as she felt his fingers tangle in her pubic hair. He tugged gently, stroking and playing long enough that she lifted her hips to push her cunt more firmly into his hands. She said, “Stop teasing.”

She felt as much heard his quiet laughter, but then he palmed her pubis and pushed his fingers inside her and she quit paying attention to anything else.

As the last tremors of her orgasm faded Nikita began rocking harder against Michael’s cock, rigid and thick against her lower back. His sharp groan made her smile. Sitting up, she turned and twisted, slipping around and over him, until she was facing him, straddling his lap. 

With her eyes locked on his, she opened herself with one hand and guided him in with the other, flicking her thumb across the tip of his cock, slick with pre-cum, before flexing her hips and sinking down and onto him. With her hands on his shoulders for balance, she arched her lower back, angling to take as much of him in as she could, humming in satisfaction at the way he stretched and filled her. Still holding his eyes, squeezing her pelvic muscles tight around him, she said, “Sixteen years is a really long time for people in our line of work.”

He started rocking his hips, bracing her with his hands. “Yes.”

“It’s not enough.”

“No.”

“So don’t give up on us.”

“I never do.”

*****

Quinn watched Michael follow Nikita up the stairs, then she went into the salon and found Adam still working with a handful of Michael’s employees. They were grouped around several large computer screens, staring at a collection of maps.

“Hey,” she said.

Adam turned at her voice, and his tired face lit up with a bright smile as he straightened up. “Hey! I heard you’d shown up for babysitting duty.”

Quinn smiled back as she exchanged air kisses and a brief hug with Michael’s oldest child. “Which is a ridiculous waste of my talents.”

“Yes. But no one else could’ve kept my sisters upstairs all night. So, you would’ve spent all your time swearing at them anyway.”

Quinn laughed. “Too true.” Sobering up, she said, “What are you looking at?”

“Maps of the known locations of former ops overlaid with known current Section activity.”

Quinn looked at the map for a moment, then looked at Adam in surprise. “How many former ops do they keep up with?”

“Probably about half of the cold ops who survived the shut down. They know a lot less about the tech and support staff.”

“Why so many?”

“You’d be surprised, or,” Adam shrugged, “maybe not, at how many former cold ops ended up doing humanitarian relief work, at least for a time.”

Quinn thought about that for a moment then she shrugged and said, “From Nikita’s section? Maybe not.” 

Adam smiled at her. “Exactly.”

“Michael said you have the notes?”

“And the summaries.” Adam turned to one of the laptops open on a smaller side table. “Everything is here. It isn’t organized as well as I’d like, but it’s the best we can do with the software we have.”

As she headed for the chair in front of the computer he pointed her to, Quinn said, “so, how’s it feel to be a full member of the team?”

“Scary as hell.”

Quinn looked sharply at him. Adam was a handsome young man, not quite as tall as his father, with olive skin and dark eyes that he must have inherited from his mother’s side of the family. His finer, smaller-boned frame and bicyclist’s lean, whipcord muscles might have made him seem less than fully consequential, but he had inherited Michael’s Roman nose and square jaw, and his imperious gaze. And perhaps his maternal grandfather’s charisma as well; at least based on what she could remember from old reports she had read long ago. Quinn could see that the experienced, trusted MSF operatives of Michael’s personal team were already responding to what had to be a genetic ability to issue instructions and have other people follow them with barely a token show of resistance.

She cocked her head and raised her brows. “And?”

Adam grinned and shrugged self-consciously. “And very exciting.”

Quinn nodded in satisfaction, then changed the subject. “So, bottom line. What do you think we’re looking at?”

Adam took a deep breath. “I think we’re looking at, and for, something that was very small and very localized at the time. Something so small that everyone thought it was completely dealt with then. But some element survived and some new, recent catalyst sent it into overdrive.”

“Makes sense.”

“Problem is, I’m worried, and I know they are too, that they can’t figure out what it is, because they don’t remember it, because whatever it was, it was so minor and unconnected at the time.”

“Nikita could barely see when she went upstairs. Are her headaches getting worse again?”

Adam shook his head. “No. Or,” he shrugged, “as far as I know anyway. She hasn’t had anything like this since her hospitalization four years ago.”

“As far as you know.”

“Or Izzy or Kate. They’d tell me.”

Remembering a series of adventures in Madagascar and then Paris that took place about two years ago, Quinn winked. “Well, the three of you together make a damn fine intelligence gathering unit, so, I think we’d know if they were trying to hide anything.”

She could tell from the quick flush on Adam’s cheeks that he remembered too. He almost smiled, but quickly sobered. “She’d tell you, right?”

Quinn shook her head. “Not necessarily.”

“Oh.” Adam frowned.

Quinn shook her head at him, and resumed her course for the computer. “Never mind that now. We’ll pursue that later, after we get out of whatever it is ahead of us tomorrow.”

After a seventy-five-minute review of all the data, Quinn had little to add to Adam’s assessment and suggested that they all needed to get some sleep. New intel would arrive in the morning and they should to be ready to respond to it. Adam and the remaining man and woman from MSF agreed. There was a general scraping and standing and stretching and groaning as they all headed upstairs after checking in with the night security team.

She looked in on the girls, relieved to find they were all five of them still sleeping soundly. Tapping on Nikita’s door a minute later brought no response so she pushed the door open as silently as possible, only to discover the lights were still on, the bed was still made and no one was there. Letting out an exasperated huff, she knocked on the bathroom door, quietly calling Nikita’s name. No one answered so she opened that door too, and found them. 

They had fallen asleep in the bath. Or rather more likely from what she could see, Nikita had fallen asleep on top of him, her head on his shoulder and her body trapping his under hers, and Michael hadn’t wanted to wake her and ended up unintentionally dozing off himself. 

Shutting the door behind her, Quinn strode over to the tub. Squatting down to shake them awake, she hesitated for a just moment, caught by the way sleep eased away the stress and the most dramatic signs of ageing in their faces. Michael’s hair and beard stubble were more grey than brown now, but asleep he otherwise could have passed for his much younger self, his tanned skin still firm and only the deep laugh lines around his eyes and mouth giving hints of his full life. With her face scrubbed clean, Nikita’s faint freckles stood out against her paler skin, and the faded purple shadows under her eyes were more obvious, and neither detracted from her soft cheek or the faintest of smiles on her full lips.

Shrugging off her brief descent into sentimentality, Quinn poked both of them sharply. “Psst! Wake up!”

Rewarded by both of them shifting irritably away from her prodding, she observed, “Post-coital drowning is an absurd death, even for you.” Smirking, she added, “Of course, given your hard-earned reputations for high-risk fucking, there is the black comedy factor.”

Michael opened his eyes, and then broke into a slow grin. “Best death profile yet,” he whispered.

Quinn sniffed, “Somewhat undignified.”

“Death is undignified.” Nikita’s low murmur made Michael laugh. He said, “So is sex.”

Nikita sat up slowly, and something about the way she moved left Quinn convinced she was still riding Michael’s cock. Michael’s laugh died and his eyes momentarily lost focus, so either he had still been hard or he was again now. Nikita reached out and wrapped her damp fingers in Quinn’s shirt as she said, “I prefer sex.” Then she pulled Quinn in and kissed her.

*****

When she entered the dining room just before six o’clock the next morning, Quinn found that Michael was awake, showered, shaved and had beaten her to the tables. With no one around to witness it and accuse her of going soft on Michael Samuelle, she felt free to return his warm hug, and even kiss him back. Once. Briefly. Even genuine affection for the man could only go so far.

Sitting down across from him a minute later, with a cup of coffee and a croissant and some fruit from the spread that someone had already set up on the buffet, she asked, “Have you seen my report?”

He nodded at the laptop computer in front of him. “Yes.”

“And?”

“I agree.”

Quinn said, “Internal politics.”

“Yes.”

“She’s just a pawn in someone else’s game. Again.”

“Yes.”

Quinn scowled. “Screw them.”

“I’d rather just kill them all.”

“Do you have the resources to cover up something that big?”

Michael scowled in turn. “No.”

“Too bad.”

“Yes.”

“Any new reports come in over night that might help?”

“Not really, mostly more confirmation for all the things we had already excluded.”

“Can I see it?”

“Of course.” He pushed the computer towards her and then rose to refill his coffee and get himself a plate of food.

After looking over the data, which as Michael had said, added nothing new, Quinn said, “That was an interesting map Adam put together last night.”

“Yes.”

“Not very helpful right now, but impressive all the same.”

Michael just grunted, absorbed in something he was scrolling past on his phone.

“I could fill it out further, and if you added intel from some others, like Jason, or Jasmine, or Mintz, it would be a valuable, and dangerous, file.”

Michael looked up sharply. After holding her eyes for a moment he said, “Sink the whole file, and destroy the drives.”

“You sure?”

Before Michael could answer, one of the men watching the front door stuck his head into the dining room. “Michael? There’s someone at the door who insists he has to speak with you, right now.”

*****

Nikita woke up feeling the mattress move as someone crawled onto the bed. Opening her eyes she said, “good morning baby,” and reached out to stroke Margaret’s hair.

“Hi Mom.”

Nikita squinted at the bedside clock, which read 6:17am. She said, “You’re awake earlier than usual.”

“I’ve been awake for an hour already. Can’t get back to sleep.”

Nikita lifted up the blankets. “Well crawl under the covers and get warm, maybe you can fall back asleep here.”

Margaret did as she suggested, snuggling down and saying, “where’s Dad?”

“Getting ready for our meeting today. He let me sleep in a little.”

Margaret rolled over and pinned her with an accusing glance. “Does your head hurt?”

Nikita ruffled Margaret’s hair and then stroked her face, savoring the feel of her satiny, still child-like skin under her fingers. She raised her brow and asked, “You know what the best thing about technological surveillance is?”

“No. What?”

“It doesn’t plague you with concerned questions.”

Margaret’s expression relaxed and she rolled her eyes. “Mom.”

Nikita leaned closer and kissed her forehead. “Try to go back to sleep. Before you know it we should be able to go home.”

Margaret obediently closed her eyes. “Okay.”

“I love you sweetie.”

As she settled further into the mattress, Margaret sighed out, “I love you too, mom.”

After swinging out of the bed, Nikita straightened the covers and pulled them smooth over Margaret, tucking her in and kissing her temple, whispering, “go back to sleep.”

She found some clothes, then slipped out of the room. Examining herself in the bathroom mirror a moment later, she decided she did look better this morning. Her eyes were clear, and she could focus, and her skin wasn’t as colorless or as puffy. She still looked tired, but that couldn’t be helped, only disguised later with cosmetics. She washed her face, brushed her hair and teeth, and then headed downstairs to see what the overnight intel had brought in.

She was half way down when Michael came out of the dining room, following one of his men to the front door, and trailed by Quinn. She had just reached the bottom of the stairs when Michael’s man opened the door to reveal Mick Schtopel dancing impatiently on the front stoop. As soon as he caught sight of Michael, he flung out his hands and cried, “Ah Michael! Good to see you again so soon! Sorry to be here so early, really I am, but it’s really, very, extremely urgent that I speak to you. Right now.”

Michael looked back at Quinn, and seeing Nikita caught her eyes too. After a quick, silent conference, Michael turned and nodded. “Okay.”

Mick stepped inside as Michael tilted his head to indicate the way, then he led the whole parade back to the dinning room.

Michael and Quinn resumed the chairs they’d obviously already been sitting in, leaving Mick standing uncomfortably in front of them. Nikita turned to the buffet to get herself coffee and a plate of food before she sat down in the open chair between Michael and Quinn. Kissing both of them in turn, lingering a moment longer on Quinn, she said, “good morning.”

Michael smiled briefly at her, laughter in his eyes, then turned to look at Mick, who was elaborately pretending to fight being shocked. Michael raised his brow said, “okay. We’re waiting. What’s so urgent?”

“Ah, well,” Mick rubbed his hands together, looked around the room nervously, rubbed his nose, then looked back to Michael and said, “well, yes. You see, I’d rather thought I’d just be speaking to you, you know,” Mick dropped his shoulder and mimed a bad boxer move, “mano a mano, you know?”

“No.”

“Okay then.” Mick took a deep breath, then plunged on. “I know this is a bit indelicate, but I have to know, to know what to tell you.” Mick stopped.

They all waited for a long beat. Then Michael said, “Mick?”

“I really, really hate that I have to ask you this question. You have no idea how much I hate it. I want to make that very clear, right up front.” He paused and looked at each of them in turn. Seeing their irritated nods, he looked straight at Michael and said, “Were you, ah,” Mick paused and grimaced one more time, “pleasuring the lovely Nikita around 4:30 this morning?”

When no one answered him, trapped as they were by the reality that was Mick, he plunged on, “you know, rogering the missus, giving her the old what for, banging-“

Nikita was hit by one of the more unwelcome waves of déjà vu of her life. She cut him off. “Mick. We get it.”

Mick shot her a helpless glare. “Seriously, I really, really hate that I have to ask, but I do.”

Quinn folded her arms across her chest. “You are a disgusting little man, you know this, right?”

Nikita exchanged a long incredulous look with Michael, who finally shrugged, looked at Mick and said, “Yes.”

Now truly exasperated, Quinn turned on Michael, “and you are apparently pathologically incapable of going soft. I am given to understand that this is a serious medical condition, and you should seek treatment as soon as possible.”

“Hush.” Nikita put her hand on Quinn’s arm. Looking across the table she said, “Mick. Your excuse better be really good.”

Mick sighed, and then glanced longingly at the empty chair at the table. Nikita said, “yes, fine, sit. And then start talking.”

“Coffee?” Mick asked as he pulled out the chair and sat down.

Feeling Quinn tense up preparatory to launching herself at Mick, no doubt to box his ears, Nikita gripped her arm and held her down. “Later,” she said.

“Okay.” Mick held up his hands in acquiescence. “Do you remember Section Four?”

Nikita frowned. “Section Four? Psy-ops?”

“Yes. You met one of their projects, years ago.”

Nikita blinked as she set down her fork with suddenly nerveless fingers. “Jerome? This is all about Jerome?”

“Yes. It is all about Jerome. All of it. In every way.”

Michael said, “Details, Mick.”

“It’s a long story. Could I please have some coffee, and maybe one or two of those lovely sticky buns? And perhaps some pink grapefruit?”

“Fine.” Nikita pushed her chair back and rose to her feet. “Talk.”

“When they rolled up the sections, they also shut down Section Four. Most of their projects were terminated, but a few were old enough and stable enough, like Jerome, to be humanely released into the world. To be tracked and studied of course. Jerome and his keeper, who was, in a particularly unfortunate coincidence, named Josephine, were for many years the great success story. Most of the others ended up permanently institutionalized.”

Michael raised his brows. “Were?”

“Yes. Josephine died of breast cancer almost five years ago.” Mick held up a spoon to avert any questions. “Yes, all that was possible was done, no expense was spared. But she contracted it before she was thirty. It was very aggressive and in the end, all was for naught.”

Quinn said, “So, Jerome was left alone.” 

“Yes. Alone in every way. Josephine wasn’t just his keeper, she was his mentor and his mother, his sister, his friend, and from more or less the time they entered the world when he was thirteen or fourteen years old, his lover.”

Nikita exchanged wary glances with Quinn and Michael. Sex, love and grief weren’t a good combination, even for the most stable of minds. She set a cup of coffee and a plate of food in front of Mick before resuming her own seat. 

Mick went on, “Until she got sick, they were doing well. She helped him stabilize and manage his gifts enough to operate outside of a completely controlled environment. In time, he was able to enter university and actually go to classes, finishing up a degree in just a few years. She eventually found a career of a sort of her own, caring for medical research animals, and I want you all to know that I’m really fighting the urge to wander off track here, and he was beginning to work on a graduate degree, genetics I understand, when she got sick. He dropped everything to care for her, and after her death his watchers were fully prepared to institutionalize him, but to everyone’s initial surprise he pulled himself together amazingly well.”

Nikita frowned. “Initial surprise?”

“Yes. Now we know why. He found a new focus object.” Mick turned his sharp gaze to Nikita. “Do you remember the Oslo Conference on women’s health you attended four years ago? You were on one of the plenary panels, about some of the new cancer vaccines?”

Nikita frowned. “Yes. I do.”

“There were photos.”

“Of course.” She shrugged. “There always are.”

“Jerome saw one with you in it. He’s been fixated on you ever since.”

“What? Why me?”

“As far as we can tell, you are literally the only other woman in his entire life with whom he has ever had any significant physical contact. And you were Section. Like him. Like his Josephine. He wants to go home, and he has decided that you, and the Sections, are his home. So he set out to systematically rebuild them.”

“Jerome did this?”

“Yes. Planting a suggestion here, an idea there, in the right minds, at the right time, and…”

Michael finished for him. “And men in power saw possibilities.”

“For what it’s worth, more than a few women as well.”

Nikita exclaimed, “Why didn’t he just pick up a phone and call me? I’m easy to find!”

“He isn’t sane, Nikita, and he wants to go home. All he remembered was that your code name was Josephine, which he decided was an omen. And when he began looking for you through the minds of his watchers, because to Jerome, that is the obvious place to begin and not, say, the internet, he learned that you were the last Operations. So it seemed to him that if he rebuilt the Sections, you, Josephine, would be recalled and would be there to take him in.”

“When did he realize that I’m a completely unsuitable candidate for the job? And, more importantly, that I don’t want it?”

“When he finally discovered your family.”

“What? That’s not a secret!”

“He didn’t think to look. Remember. Not sane. Never was. Also. Raised in a glass box.”

“So when did he realize that I’m married to Michael, and that we have children of our own?”

“When he figured out that he’d started more than he could control, and that the men with the money weren’t going to recall you. He demanded to know why – and they told him. About ten months ago.”

“I see.” Nikita titled her head as she considered Mick. She said, slowly, “The men who came to ask me to go back to the perch were sent by Jerome, and not by the Agency, weren’t they.”

“Yes.”

“Why couldn’t he control it better?” asked Quinn.

“He is, of course, much stronger now as an adult than he was as a child, but as far as we can tell, he can still really only affect one thing, or one person, at a time. And, more or less, whatever it is has to be within unassisted visual range. The closer to him, the more he can affect, and the further away the less control he has. And the more people or objects he tries to manipulate or read, and with more precision, the more erratic the results. So once the Sections really started taking shape – your plans, by the way, have been most helpful, love – there were too many people in too many places, with their own goals, agendas and plans.”

Quinn cut in, “So, his mommy and lover fantasies took a major hit when he realized she’s already married and has a litter of children with another guy.”

“Yes.” Mick grimaced in Quinn’s direction, then looked at Nikita again, “And the fact that you’re married to Michael….”

“Let me guess,” Michael said. “I’m the only other person alive who has ever had meaningful physical contact with Jerome.”

“Yes. Freudian daddy issues galore.”

“So, what’s going on now?”

“He got wind of your return to Paris and insisted that he needed to speak with you, with you both, and with your ‘other’ children. The people at Center and Oversight agreed that it might be best for all concerned to allow a meeting to go forward under controlled conditions.”

Nikita’s blood turned to ice. “Meaning, inside Section One.”

“Yes.”

She went on, “Our whole family.”

“Yes.”

Michael inclined his head and said, “Thank you Mick.”

Mick grinned broadly. “You’re welcome.”

Quinn said, “What?”

Nikita answered, “Mick tipped the lowlife.”

Mick faked some modesty. “Well, not him directly, one of his suppliers.”

Nikita smiled at him and held out her hand, which Mick took and gripped firmly. She said, “The message got through.”

“Hate to break up this unexpectedly horrifying love fest,” Quinn interrupted, “but what happened at 4:30 this morning that had you on our doorstep barely two hours later?”

Mick’s smile vanished and he pulled his hand back. “Jerome slipped his leash. We all knew where you were, you aren’t hiding, but now we’ve lost Jerome. We couldn’t think of what would have set him off in the middle of the night, our teams here reported nothing unusual happening. Which is when, having once been Nikita’s neighbor, you see,” Mick paused to share a conspiratorial wink with Quinn that made her sneer at him, “I recalled that 4:30 in the morning is not an unusual hour for, ah, nocturnal activities, if you get my drift, between the couple at the heart of Jerome’s obsessions. Which sent me here at the double quick to confirm, and then, with clearances in hand, to tell you everything.”

Quinn’s tone was very, very dry. “So. Jerome flew the coop when he sensed Mommy and Daddy fucking.”

Mick made series of uncomfortable and yet leering faces that made Nikita want to hit him upside the head, then he said, “Yes.”

Nikita looked at Michael, something tugging at the edge of her consciousness, and saw the same uncertainty in his eyes. Then she was on her feet even as Michael said, “the children.”

Michael was still faster than she was and he was half way up the stairs before she had reached the foot. He was inside the little girls’ room, sitting on Gabrielle’s bed and waking her up while pressing a wide-awake Sophie close to his side when Nikita flew past to the big front room Izzy, Kate and Margaret were sharing. Kate was still asleep, and Izzy was getting dressed when Nikita flung open the door. She said, “Get your sister dressed and into the dining room. Quickly.”

Then she headed for the room she and Michael had shared, willing Margaret to still be there, safely asleep in their bed. Behind her, she heard Michael and Sophie knocking on Adam’s door and Adam’s sleepy voice answering. Pushing the door open, she saw only an empty bed. Telling herself all would be well, she turned for the hall bathroom, only to see a confused member of Michael’s staff walking out and into Quinn’s glare. “Margaret?” Nikita said.

Quinn said, “not in my room.”

“Margaret?” Nikita called down the hallway.

There was no answer and the passage fell silent, the adults shooting tight, anxious glares in every direction. “Margaret?” she called louder. “Has anyone seen Margaret?”

“Mommy?” Sophie’s voice was quiet and frightened. “Margaret took Baron outside a few minutes ago. He needed to go.”

Michael said, “Everyone else, dining room,” as he pushed Sophie toward Adam and scooped up Gabrielle and gave her to Quinn. To another MSF staffer, who had just come up the stairs, he said, “Did you see Margaret take the dog out?”

“Yes sir. Eric and Karol went with her.”

“Do you know where they were going?”

“To the river walk, sir, it’s just a block over.”

Adam put his hands on Sophie’s shoulders, gently squeezing before letting go. He said to Izzy, “take her,” then he vanished into his room.

Michael plunged down the stairs, calling for his team, with the staffers at his heels, while Nikita turned to Quinn, who nodded and hustled the rest of their daughters after them, Gabrielle still in her arms and clinging to her neck. Nikita went to her room and quickly changed into street clothes. She was pulling on a coat as she rushed down the stairs, reaching the lobby as a fully dressed Adam and Michael met at the front door, a team of three with them. “Michael?”

Michael nodded and handed her the extra gun he was holding. The rest of the group was already armed. “Eric and Karol aren’t answering their phones. Quinn, Mick and five others are with the girls. Mick is calling his personnel for updates and reinforcements. J.B. is rounding up another team.”

Just then Quinn walked out of the salon and handed each of them an earpiece. “Here. They’re not military quality, but they will cover a two kilometer range.”

Michael called, “Mick? Anything?”

Mick appeared in the entry to the dining room, phone in hand. “Yes. They headed west on the river walk five minutes ago.”

Michael nodded at the group by the door. “Let’s go.”

They ran.

They all spotted the fallen bodies about a hundred meters in front of them as soon as they turned onto the river walk, but Adam got to them first, his father hard on his heels. They knelt and checked for life signs. Adam looked up as Nikita drew nearer. “Eric and Karol. Both dead. No sign of Margaret or Baron.”

Reaching Michael’s side, Nikita saw that Eric and Karol had died the same way she remembered Section operatives dying; blood leaking from their noses, mouths and ears, even, in Eric’s case, from the corners of his eyes.

Nikita stood up straight and turned slowly in a circle, taking in the environment around her as fully as possible. At last she came to a stop, looking up the street that led away from the river directly in front of them. She took a deep breath and, pitching her voice low and full, to carry as far and as clearly as possible, she called, “Jerome? Jerome? Can you hear me? It’s me, Nikita. If you want to talk to me, please call me. Or come to the hotel. Michael’s here too. We would both like to see you again.” She paused, but the only sounds she heard were the river and the noises of the city coming to life on a bright, sunny Saturday morning. “Jerome? Please don’t hurt Margaret. She doesn’t know who you are.”

*****

Quinn looked up at Mick, who was hovering restlessly around the edges of the dinning room. “They’ve found the guards.”

Mick raised his brows. “Alive?”

“No.” Quinn shook her head. “No sign of Margaret or Baron.”

“Damn.”

“Michael says to brief the girls. They’re going to spend some time at the site and then follow the most obvious exit route to the edge of our communications range.”

Mick gaped in shock. “Brief the girls?” He gestured at Michael and Nikita’s remaining daughters with his head. “These girls?”

“Yes.” Quinn held his eyes until he raised his hands in surrender.

Mick turned to face Isabella, Katherine, Sophie and Gabrielle, who had gathered into a tight knot in the middle of the room when Quinn gave the update.

“Okay.” He rubbed his hands together, coughed uncomfortably and began. “Your Uncle Mick has some bad news for you.”

“Uncle?” Gabrielle frowned. “You aren’t our uncle.”

“Honorary uncle, then.”

Kate snorted derisively and her expression suggested that she regarded Mick like something nasty stuck on her shoe. Her tone dripped with adolescent challenge as she explained in tiny words, “You don’t decide that. Mom and dad choose who our extra uncles are – and I bet neither one of them would do you with a ten-foot pole. Tell us about Margaret.”

For a time-stopping moment, Quinn saw in Kate the brash insolence that had carried Nikita through the streets at an age not so very much older than Kate was now. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, she might have actually damaged herself laughing at Mick’s expression of horrified recognition. As it was, her slightly hysterical giggles erupted in a choked kind of sniggering.

“Excuse me,” Mick said to the girls, then he spun on Quinn, grabbed her by the upper arm and hauled her from her chair and into the hall. “What the hell?”

Quinn got herself under control. “I’m the only ‘honorary aunt’ in their lives right now. Or uncle, for that matter.”

Mick could only manage a strangled sound.

“They do have real aunts you know, and an uncle by marriage and cousins and everything.”

Mick made the same sound.

Quinn took a little pity on him. “Nikita’s pretty hostile to secrets. And I pre-date all of them anyway.”

Mick shook his whole body, like he was trying to shake off ants. “I’m just still coming to terms with all this.” He shot her a skeptical look. “Michael just never seemed your type.”

“God you’re dimwitted. Michael isn’t ‘my type.’ He’s the price of admission.”

“Oh.” Mick blinked a few times. “Oh. I see.”

“Do you?”

“Ah. No.” Mick shook his head sharply. “Michael was always a possessive, jealous son-of-a-bitch where Nikita was concerned.”

“Yes. Quite. Still true.” Quinn sighed. “But, Nikita explained to him what she wanted, and he accepted that.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t like to say ‘no’ to her.”

“He used to say ‘no’ to her all the damned time!”

“Those were not the good years Mick.”

“Ah. He learned then.”

“Example number five million and one why he’s a smarter man than you will ever be.” Quinn pointed to the dining room. “Briefing Mick. Now.”

Mick didn’t move. Instead, he thrust his hands into his pockets and tilted his head in confusion. “Why do you put up with the arrangement?”

“Why, after almost twenty years, did you risk having your brain melted out your nose to tip them off about the Section?”

Mick opened his mouth to reply, and then closed it again. He considered her quietly for a moment, then he said, “Heroes and sidekicks, yeah?”

Despite herself, Quinn smiled back at him, suddenly understanding why neither Michael nor Nikita had killed him yet, despite endless provocation. “Yeah.”

Walking back into the other room, they discovered that Sophie and Gabrielle were now sitting at the center table, with Katherine and Isabella standing over their shoulders, eyes watchful and expressions grim.

Isabella, always the spokesperson for the group, said, “Okay, ‘Uncle’ Mick,” raising her brows and not quite sneering as she flung the title back in his face, “Someone took Margaret. Who and why?”

Mick shot another agonized look at Quinn, and then turned to face his interrogator. “Okay. Yes. You figured that out correctly. Margaret has been taken by a man your mother, your parents, knew years ago when they had different jobs.”

Katherine let out an exasperated sniff. “If you mean the Section, say so.” Her glare could have frozen blood, “ ‘Uncle’ Mick.”

“Look, obviously, I’m not ‘that kind’ of uncle.”

Isabella said, “No. You aren’t any kind of uncle. Not to us.”

“And how do they know about the Section, anyway?” Mick rolled frantic eyes at Quinn.

Quinn made an incredulous face at him and said, “Nikita. Hostile to secrets. Past, present and future. Remember?”

Mick held her stare for a long beat, then turned to face the girls again. “Some twenty years ago, your parents crossed paths with a ten year old boy named Jerome. He was a Section project in telepathy and telekinesis, bred and trained, essentially, to be a human blood hound, tracing thoughts, not scents.”

“What’s telekinesis?” Sophie asked.

Katherine touched her shoulder and said, “I’ll explain later.”

Mick went on, “Your parents were the only two people to ever treat him, even for just a short time, like a normal child rather than a freak of nature. It helped him see other possibilities for himself. After the Sections closed he was able to live a fairly normal life, with the aid and support of his,” Mick hesitated a second, “girlfriend.” He shook his head, and continued, “Sadly, she died of cancer five years ago. After he lost her, Jerome remembered your parents. He has been working to recreate the Sections ever since, so they could all go home, him, Nikita and Michael.”

Isabella frowned. “So, why would he take Margaret?”

“We don’t know, unfortunately.”

Katherine examined Mick thoughtfully, and then said, “He’s jealous of us, isn’t he.”

Mick’s shoulders sagged. “We think so. Yes.”

“Will he hurt Margaret?” Isabella asked.

Mick met her gaze head on. “We don’t know.”

“So what now?” she asked.

Quinn answered. “While we wait for the team to get back, let’s get everything re-packed. My hunch is that we will be moving on shortly. And Sophie and Gabrielle need to get out of their pajamas and into some clothes.”

They had just finished sorting out the bags when sounds from the lobby alerted them to the return of Michael, Nikita, Adam and their team, which was much larger now as they seemed to have picked up Section operatives along the way, and a second MSF squad.

When they reached the ground floor, Michael was already issuing orders to Mick, requesting in his polite ‘not a request but actually a demand’ way that Mick turn over to them copies of every file they had on Jerome. Mick assured him that the files were already being sent. Then he looked at his remaining daughters, and at some unspoken signal they launched themselves into his arms. Quinn and Nikita had wondered for years how he managed to not fall over under the onslaught, but all the practice continued to pay off. Katherine broke off from the mass hug first and turned to wrap her arms around Nikita, burying her face in her mother’s shoulder. In another moment Michael emerged from the scrum with Gabrielle in his arms, and he headed for the dining room.

Once they had all reassembled, Nikita said, “Mick. How badly compromised is our apartment?”

Mick scrunched up his face. “Badly. I wouldn’t have needed to ask you any embarrassing questions earlier if you’d gone straight home.”

Nikita closed her eyes for a moment, in rage and despair both Quinn was sure. Then she looked at Mick. “Even the bathrooms?”

Mick shrugged. “I’m not in charge of that, but probably.”

Quinn burst out, “Fucking perverts.”

Mick shrugged again. “Yeah.”

Michael said, “Quinn? How much can be disabled?”

“With the right tools? Most of it, probably.”

“Can we at least get privacy back in the bathrooms?” Nikita asked.

“I think so. With professional help.”

Mick started, “I can call-“

Four people interrupted him all at once, as Michael, Nikita, Quinn and Adam all said, “No!”

Michael said, “We will call our own contacts.”

Nikita sighed, “Okay. Girls – it’s up to you. We can stay here at this hotel, or we can go home, knowing that in our apartment we will be under surveillance, all the time, even possibly in your bedrooms.”

Quinn was not surprised when the vote came in at unanimous for going home.

*****

A crew dispatched from French Military Intelligence arrived at their apartment not long after they did. Nikita stood with her shoulder brushing Michael’s, watching together as the technicians overloaded the circuits throughout the old building, frying everything tied directly into the building’s main current. Tiny bursts of light and smoke and small popping noises erupted throughout the rooms she could see. While electricians worked to restore the fried circuitry, other technicians came through with detectors and sensors, collecting almost two dozen small, stand alone bugs before they finished. After that, another crew installed dampeners in the bathrooms and bedrooms.

While the technicians worked on disabling as much of the surveillance as they could, not that Nikita believed they’d ever get it all, she and the girls unpacked and put away everything they had brought home. Michael, Adam and J.B., along with their team, re-established their networks and equipment in Michael’s office. Quinn sat in the living room combing through the data on Jerome sent by Mick.

Knowing that all was being done that could be done, Nikita concentrated on being fully present with her children. Once they unpacked, she sat down on the floor with Sophie and Gabrielle to help them re-organize their toys according to their current schemes and stories. 

Eventually they lost themselves in their games, and Nikita went in search of Kate and Izzy. She found them on the balcony, sitting with Michael on the glider, one of them on each side of him, his arms around their shoulders. They weren’t talking; they were just rocking gently as they watched the Paris skyline together, gleaming and smoking in the bright mid-winter sun. 

Rather than disturb them, she collected Adam from the office and they headed out to get enough groceries to hold everyone together for the next day or so. After they unloaded everything in the kitchen, Adam caught her arm. “Mom. We’ll get her back.”

Nikita smiled against the wetness in her eyes. “I know.”

“You got me back. We can get her back.”

“Oh Adam.” Her voice caught on a sob. “When did you get so grown up?”

“I’m not all that grown up yet.” 

Adam’s voice was soothing and his arms were strong and solid as he pulled her close, but she felt the wetness on his unshaven cheeks and she remembered the terrified six year old he had been, just yesterday and so very long ago.

“Thank you.” She kissed his forehead, then leaned back as she brushed away his tears with her hands. “You’re right. We’ll get her home again.”

The hours slipped away as they waited for Jerome to reach out to them. Quinn’s work with Section’s files resulted in teams being dispatched to all of Jerome’s known places of residence, to his university, the hospital where Josephine had been treated, and where she had died, and the cemetery that held her ashes. Everything was clean except for his current apartment, which showed every sign of having been abandoned in haste, but with no clues for where he might have gone.

Quinn shook her head dispiritedly. “Psych profiles aren’t my strength, especially when working with someone as far outside of the curve as Jerome, but everything suggests that he is going to contact you. It’s you he wants, not Margaret. I also don’t think he will hurt her, because he wants you to come take care of him. I think he is rational enough to recognize a counterproductive strategy when he sees one.”

“So why did he take her?”

“Opportunity, I think. For information. For a point of contact. To touch you, but at a safe distance. To make sure you won’t refuse to see him.”

By the time evening began to fall, they had all drifted into the large, comfortable living room. Sophie and Gabrielle were curled up on the big sofa next to Michael as he read aloud to them. Nikita sat on one of the smaller couches with her arm around Isabella, who rested her head on Nikita’s shoulder. Katherine sat on the ground next to them, leaning up against Nikita’s knee as Nikita combed her hair with her fingers, all of them listening to Michael’s voice. Adam sat at a nearby table, working quietly on a laptop. Quinn was at the table in the dining room.

The quiet was broken when J.B. rushed in. “He’s transmitting now.”

They quickly gathered in Michael’s office, all of them staring at the large screen set up in the middle of the room. Nikita opened the connection and said, “Jerome?”

The screen was still dark, but a man’s voice replied, “Nikita? You know it’s me?”

“Yes. People from the Section have been telling us a lot about you today.”

“I’m sure they have.”

“How is Margaret?”

“She’s fine.”

“Will you let her come home?”

“Her home, here in Paris?”

“Yes. Our apartment here in Paris, with her family.”

“And if I wanted to be part of your family?”

“Then you should be here too.”

“How could you forget me, Nikita? I thought you cared about me.”

“I never forgot you, Jerome. I did care about you. I’d like to know you today, learn who you’ve grown up to be.”

“Michael?”

“Yes. I’m here Jerome.”

“Is Adam with you tonight?”

“Yes.”

“You got him back, when he was a child.”

“Yes. I did.”

“You left me in Section.”

“The last time we saw you, Jerome, you were with Josephine. You were happy to be going with her.”

“She left me.”

Nikita said, “I’m sure she didn’t want too, Jerome.”

“No. But what she wanted didn’t matter. What I wanted didn’t matter.”

“Jerome. Can I speak to Margaret, please? I’m sure she is frightened.”

“Yes. She is.”

Margaret’s strained face appeared on the monitor.

“Hi Mom.”

“How are you doing, sweetheart?”

“I’m rolling with things.”

“You are such a brave girl. I love you and I am so proud of you.”

Margaret flashed a quick, tremulous smile, then said. “Dad?”

“Yes, Margaret?”

“Jerome says for you, all of you, the whole family, to meet us at the Palais Bercy in two hours. The Section is to make sure it is secured and cordoned off. You all have to come. Jerome wants to see everyone in the family, all together.”

“We will be there. Can I bring anything for you, or for Baron?”

Margaret smiled nervously. “Can you bring Baron some food? Jerome didn’t realize how much a big dog eats.”

“Okay. And for you?”

“My coat and some dry shoes. I’m cold, dad.”

The monitor went dark.

*****

They arrived at the big stadium twenty minutes ahead of time. The Section had managed to close off all the surrounding streets, mostly, as far as Nikita could tell, by calling in French military police. 

Using Margaret’s hint, they had determined that Jerome had never really left the vicinity of river. They must have spent the day in the vast tunnel system under the city, making their way from the Left Bank to the stadium they were in now.

In the stadium parking lot a man dressed in black stepped out of a dark van and introduced himself as Cassius, level five operative. He explained the profile. A perimeter team would go first, ten operatives lining the field. Next, their family would enter the stadium; each of their remaining children flanked by two armed guards, along with Quinn and Mick, each with one guard, and herself and Michael, also with a personal guard each.

“No.” Michael said. “Guards on our children, but not on us.”

“Numbers overwhelm him.”

Nikita said, “So, send the extra team in with the first group. Same number overall.”

Cassius shrugged. “Okay.”

“Are they here already?” she asked.

“We think so. Our scans show multiple heat signatures, but Jerome has demonstrated an ability to confuse electronic sensors in the past, and we aren’t sure which ones are real and which ones are ghosts.”

Fifteen minutes later they filed into the field according to the profile.

Two hours exactly after Jerome’s transmission, Nikita called, “Jerome?”

A shadow detached itself from a darkened entrance on the far side of the field. As they moved into the light, Nikita could see it was Margaret, with Baron padding next to her on his leash, and on her other side, a man who must be Jerome.

They stopped about six meters away from Michael and Nikita, well inside the circle cast by the stadium lights. Margaret was pale but seemed calm. Her face and hands were clean, but her jeans and sweatshirt were damp and muddy, especially at the knees and elbows. She nodded once at Nikita, then shifted her gaze back to Jerome, obviously unwilling to move further without his permission.

Nikita looked at Jerome as well, trying to find a point of resemblance to the child she barely remembered, and failing. He had grown up to be a slim man, just over medium height with non-descript brown hair in need of a cut, a prominent nose and soft brown eyes. She would have passed him on the street without a second glance. “Hi Jerome.”

“Hi Nikita.”

“Will you let Margaret come to us?”

“Not yet.”

“Okay. What shall we do instead?”

“First, we need to get rid of all the extra people. They aren’t part of this. They don’t belong here.”

“They’re here just to make sure that we all get home safely.”

“I don’t want them here.”

“Jerome….” Nikita trailed off as she watched all the operatives in the stadium begin to go glassy eyed and start to waver, and then blood began to trickle out their noses. “Jerome!” she cried, starting forward. Michael’s hand on her shoulder stopped her. “Jerome! No! Please don’t hurt them!”

Jerome just stared into the middle distance, not really watching anything or anyone as the men and women from the Section, from MSF and from the French army began to topple over and begin thrashing on the ground. When they saw what was happening, both Sophie and Gabrielle started to scream in high, thin voices. Sophie was too frightened to do anything but stand frozen between her thrashing guards and wail, but Gabrielle broke and started to run for Nikita. Adam stopped her, scooping her up in his arms and holding her tightly as she buried her face in his neck and whimpered in fear.

Once all the operatives were still, Jerome refocused on Nikita and Michael. “That’s better,” he said. He said, “Tell me why you don’t want to come back to the Section. Tell me why you don’t want to come home. I don’t understand.”

“I hated it there, Jerome. Surely you knew that about me, even back then.”

“Yes. But it will be different now. I promise.” His expression turned eager and excited. “I’ll make sure everyone does exactly what you tell them, with none of the bad stuff you hated so. I can do that for you. I can make it happen. We could be an amazing team.”

“I was able to leave the Section a long time ago, Jerome, at the same time you did. Just like you and Josephine, I built a life outside, one that I love very much, and don’t want to give up.”

Jerome looked petulant. “With your family.”

“Yes. With my family.”

“With Michael. And his son. And your daughters.”

“Yes. With Michael. And Adam. And our daughters.”

He raised his chin, and said, with some satisfaction, “You fear me.”

“Yes.” Nikita nodded. “And for you. The world isn’t kind to people like you Jerome. Let us help you.”

“Make me part of your family?”

“Make you a friend, to start with.”

“Not good enough.”

“Jerome. I don’t want to promise you something that might not work out.”

“Why wouldn’t it work out?”

“Well, you might not like being part of a big family.”

“Then, let’s make it smaller.” Jerome looked straight at Michael. “One son is enough, don’t you think?”

Jerome turned his gaze to Adam, saying, “Don’t move, Michael. Adam, you’d better put Gabrielle down, so you don’t drop her when you fall.”

Adam’s eyes started to loose focus and less than a full second later a thin trickle of blood started to seep out of his nose. He let Gabrielle, already screaming again, slip gently to the ground to stand at his feet.

Nikita yelled, “Jerome! Stop it!” at the same instant that Margaret turned, stomped on his foot and then elbowed him hard in the stomach, breaking his concentration. As Jerome sagged, Margaret started to run for Michael and Nikita. Confused by the screaming and by Margaret’s sudden movement, Baron broke away from her and launched himself at Jerome, a howling growl bursting from him as he flew through the air. Jerome spun toward the seventy kilos of flying dog and, a look of terror on his face, flung out his hand, sending Baron hurtling in the opposite direction. Baron landed with an audibly bone-crunching thump, and lay still. 

Margaret, seeing her dog fall, changed course, veering towards Baron’s body.

Looking horrified, Jerome cried, “Margaret, no! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to hurt him. Come back here!”

Michael caught Adam as he buckled to the ground. He yelled, “Jerome. Let them go.”

Margaret reached Baron’s side, falling to her knees as she shook him roughly, calling his name. 

In an instant she was back on her feet, racing toward Jerome, screaming as she ran. “You killed him! You killed my dog! You killed all these people! You promised me no one would get hurt if I did what you said! You promised me! And now you’re killing my brother! You fucking liar!”

Nikita started to run too, calling, “Margaret, No! Leave him be. Stop! Now!”

Jerome turned to face Margaret, his face full of dismayed shock even as he raised his arms to ward her off, launching her into the air as effortlessly as he had Baron.

Nikita pivoted and raced toward her daughter’s airborne body, her arms stretching to catch her before she hit the ground, knowing already she would be too late, when she heard shots ring out; two, four, six. She saw the bullets enter Jerome’s chest, blood flying in the bright stadium lights, his torso jerking from the impact. 

Margaret’s body crumpled to the ground just two strides in front of her, and she turned and looked behind her to see who had fired even as she slid to her knees beside Margaret, reaching to feel for her heartbeat. 

Isabella and Katherine were two meters behind Michael, Adam, and Gabrielle. They stood close together, feet planted shoulders’ width apart in the stance she and Michael had taught them, each holding a two-handed, straight-armed grip on the guns they must have taken from the bodies of their fallen guards. As Nikita stared in shock, they each fired one last round into Jerome’s corpse. Then they slowly relaxed their stances, dropping their hands and looking at each other and nodding, some message passing between them that only they could see.

Nikita sought Michael’s eyes even as he turned his face toward her. She held his gaze as she shook her head. Margaret was dead.

*****

For Quinn the crucial events that night in the stadium would always be a series of unrelated sounds and still images, images that she could never quite get to run together in her head even though all of it had been caught by the Section’s cameras, and from several angles. She was also not sure how many of the images were from her own eyes, or from the videos. It seemed like she remembered more than she really could have seen from her position behind Nikita, Michael and their children, where she had been rooted to the ground until it was all over. It had all happened in less than five minutes, counting from the time they walked into the stadium.

Sophie and Gabrielle screaming. Adam catching Gabrielle mid-stride. Adam slumping to the ground in his father’s arms, eyes closed and blood trickling over his lips and down his chin. Margaret elbowing a shocked Jerome in the gut. Margaret running for Nikita. Baron howling in mid air. Margaret yelling at Jerome. Nikita falling to her knees beside Margaret, her face already ravaged with grief to come. Isabella and Katherine with guns in their hands and death in their eyes. 

After that Quinn could remember movement, though it was all hazy, like a bad dream sequence in a cheap movie. She had gone to Katherine and Isabella, taking the guns from their unresisting fingers, their expressions slack with shock; deeper, darker emotions swimming at the backs of their light eyes. Mick had gone to Michael and helped him lift Adam to his feet, weakened and wobbling, but otherwise without permanent damage from Jerome’s assault. Michael hurried to Nikita’s side, where she was curled over Margaret, whispering to her and stroking her hair back from her face. He fell to his knees beside Nikita and carefully pulled her away from their fallen child. Then he examined Margaret for himself. Only after he carefully gathered her up and cradled her in his arms, tears already falling down his cheeks as he cried without making a sound, did Quinn realize that Margaret had not survived her fall.

It was about then that Quinn had realized that Sophie was still frozen in place and screaming, a high-pitched wail of terrified hysteria. Nikita must have realized it just a heartbeat or two sooner, for she was already pushing herself to her feet and making her way to Sophie’s side.

Then Cassius strode onto the field, more operatives called from somewhere at his heels, and took charge of cleaning everything up.

They pushed everyone into ambulances, calming the sudden flare of resistance by assuring them, truthfully, that these were real ambulances, headed for a real world hospital. J.B. and a group of operatives and doctors from MSF met them at the emergency room. The MSF people quickly claimed their own, firmly brushing aside any and all efforts of the regular hospital staff to interfere. No one other than Margaret and Adam had taken any physical hurt at all, but they were all numb and frozen with shock and grief, even Quinn. Only Mick escaped and he was surprisingly soothing and efficient as he and J.B. worked with the doctors and nurses of MSF to warm them up while pressing liquids and calories on anyone passing by.

There was another awful moment when Michael wouldn’t, or couldn’t, relinquish Margaret’s body to the doctors. He stood, straight-backed and pale under his tan, holding Margaret cradled against his chest, her head loose on his shoulder, flaxen hair gleaming against the dark brown of his sweater, and he could not let go. Not until Nikita arrived at his side and put her head close to his, saying things no one but he could hear as she stroked his shoulders and his arms. At last she put her hands on his, and with their gazes locked, together they laid their daughter down. 

There was a terrifying, fleeting second when Quinn thought Michael might step back, turn on his heel and leave them all there, but then Nikita murmured something else to him. He nodded and went to Katherine and Isabella, folding them both into his arms and pressing their heads against his shoulders. That was when they both finally collapsed, shaking as they sobbed against his neck.

Somehow the MSF teams got everyone back to Nikita and Michael’s apartment and put them all to bed, using every trick they had at their disposal to get them to sleep. In Michael’s case, she was pretty sure it was intravenous drugs. She herself went the traditional route, sitting silently in the kitchen with J.B. and Mick, downing shot after shot of vodka. They matched her, glass for glass.

*****

Jason arrived from New Orleans and Jasmine from Los Angeles within fifteen hours of Margaret’s death. They took charge of planning her funeral and all the related events, rudely brushing aside the efforts of Nikita’s many woman friends from her MSF and public health circles. Nikita knew she would eventually have to soothe her friends’ hurt feelings, but she also knew any funeral they planned by committee would be un-endurable for Michael. 

Nikita gave Jason, Jasmine and Quinn instructions to organize an event that closely echoed Walter’s funeral four years earlier, using the same chapel, the same reception hall, the same simple, vaguely neo-pagan service. She also asked them to respect Margaret’s passionate desire for everything to be normal, regular, and conventional.

Nikita’s sister-in-law Genevieve, her husband and their three grown children drove in from Marseilles the next day. They took rooms in a hotel close to the apartment, and her brother-in-law commandeered her kitchen. He made sure that there was an ocean of food and drink constantly available to the swarms of people that were flowing through; family, friends, security teams, medical staff, counselors. Nikita lost track of the names, and after a while she quit worrying about it. She trusted Quinn and J.B. to make sure that no one got in who didn’t belong.

Nikita had always been a little mystified by Adam’s generally private and yet omnivorous sex life, and so she didn’t know whether it was horrifying or hilarious or both that within thirty-six hours at least a half dozen current and former partners were in Paris, swirling around him in a vortex of near-smothering, intensely prickly and jealous concern.

Most of Nikita’s time and energy was taken by Michael, fighting to keep him anchored in the present and to hold him together long enough to get through the very public events of the week. She ruthlessly turned their daughters into her agents and collaborators. She pushed them on him, urging them all to hug him and kiss him as often as possible, knowing he wouldn’t thrust them away and it would keep him from burrowing in on himself so far he couldn’t get out again. She even violated the longest standing, most ironclad parenting rule she and Michael had ever had, and invited the girls to sleep the full night their bed if they wished. It was both reassuring and extremely worrisome that Michael didn’t object. They slept in a twisted pile, badly for the most part, but together. 

During the second night she realized Sophie was creeping away to sleep in Margaret’s bed. So, the third night, she left Michael to Katherine and Gabrielle and she dozed while curled around Sophie, who whimpered in her sleep almost all night long.

Nikita also stayed at his side during all the meetings and debriefings they faced. Everyone who had been even tangentially involved in the final days of Jerome’s life wanted to hear directly from them about their impressions and experiences. They were particularly interested in Jerome’s newly demonstrated ability to take out some two-dozen operatives without, apparently, needing any recovery time before attacking again. At least a few people suggested that they should have stopped Isabella and Katherine from killing him, even that it betrayed a lack of true parental sensibility that their pretty, pretty daughters had known what to do with a gun. They also would have liked to speak with the girls, but Michael and Nikita absolutely forbade it, the wild fierceness in Michael’s eyes convincing even the most determined to respect their wishes. 

Others – officers, politicians, officials – wanted to personally express condolences and sympathy, and offer, sincerely or not, to help in any way in the weeks to come. And, of course, there was the Agency, and the Section. Now that they all knew that they all knew, the current Agency directors offered her and Michael both positions in the re-booted Section One. Michael laughed wildly in their faces, and then pulled his own gun on them. Mick hustled the Agency directors out one door while she talked Michael down and out the other.

Theirs was not the only loss, and not the only funeral of the week. Section operatives were disposed of anonymously, of course, and most of the MSF operatives and French soldiers killed by Jerome were not from Paris, and their bodies were sent home to their families. But there were still a half dozen funerals or memorial services held for those with family in the city. Nikita felt that she and Michael would create too great a commotion if they tried to attend, but she was reluctant to ignore them altogether. It was, after all, her fault they had died. So she turned to Adam, Isabella and Katherine. Katherine declined in a dramatic fit of weeping and wailing about being asked to do something so ghoulish. Isabella watched it all in silence, then said Katherine could stay home with the children if she preferred. Isabella and Adam attended each one, growing still graver and quieter as the week passed.

Margaret’s funeral was Thursday. Jason, good Louisiana boy that he was, suggested an open casket. Nikita vetoed the idea immediately, knowing there was no way Michael would make it through something like that. Jason also suggested preparing a video of Margaret to show at the reception afterward, but Nikita knew that would destroy her, so she said no again. 

A few times Quinn or Jasmine pressed her to talk to them about how she was feeling, but the only answer she had for them was ‘numb’ and so they let her be.

The small, non-denominational church was packed nearly to the rafters for the brief service. Their family included Michael’s sister Genevieve, her husband and their children who sat with them, along with Quinn and several of Adam’s friends. Nikita’s sister Michele put in a brief appearance, but she did not sit with the family and left without speaking to anyone almost the second the ceremony was over. MSF workers and other long time family friends formed the bulk of the crowd. There were also a startlingly large number of old Section people in attendance. Many of them found a moment to speak to Nikita and it surprised her how glad she was to see most of them. It was the result, she gathered, of one phone call to another, stretching around the globe and back again in a web that was thicker and denser than most of them had realized. 

They buried Margaret in a little cemetery not far from their apartment. It was one they had walked in often the last time they had lived in Paris, inventing elaborate histories for all the grave-stone statuary as they strolled down the paths. 

Afterwards they returned to the reception already in full swing. Despite, or perhaps because of, Jason’s efforts it reminded Nikita of a macabre Hollywood facsimile of a Mafia Don’s wake. She and Michael sat at a table near the head of the room and accepted tribute after tribute to Michael or herself from people who wouldn’t have known Margaret on the street. After Michael downed his fifth scotch in less than an hour and a manic glint appeared in his eye, she packed him and the little girls up and took them home.

*****

An hour or so after Nikita had taken Michael away, Quinn surveyed the crowd and realized that the majority of the eighty or so people remaining were former Section operatives or current MSF ones. Buoyed by the river of free booze Jason had provided, the brotherhood of blood and death was obviously rousing itself for an evening of debauchery and memory. At the center of a loose circle of MSF operatives she spotted Adam, Isabella and Katherine. Many of the men and women there had watched the three of them grow up, all over the world, and had always treated them with rough kindness, but mostly ignored them when they were little kids. Adam had long since been welcomed into their ranks, and now, after their own first kills, they were reaching out to Isabella and Katherine, too. The girls were flushed from emotion, and praise, and, Quinn realized watching someone refill the glass in Kate’s hand, alcohol. 

Isabella was already five feet ten inches tall, and Kate would catch her soon, and both were still drenched with the dewy glow of youth and nearly luminous in their maturing bodies, but they were kids and it was definitely time to get them out of there. Death was tied much too closely to sex, and not only were the girls still very young this was not the time or the way for them. Especially not while surrounded by thirty or so well armed, and rapidly inebriating, self-appointed older chaperones, some of whom weren’t really all that much older than the girls and who were casting newly appraising looks their way. Or their actual brother, who was himself an excellent marksman and a useful man to have on your side in a bar fight, if stories she had heard were to be believed.

She was just about to dive into the crowd to go after them herself, when she realized that Adam was pulling them free. He turned them over to their aunt and uncle, who swept them out of the room. She caught Adam’s eye and raised her glass to toast him. She saw him laugh in acknowledgement, and then she let the current take her.

Mick soon commanded a center of attention, launched to importance by his status as ‘person who has known Michael and Nikita the longest’ and his ability to tell side-splittingly funny versions of stories from their earliest days together in the Section. Quinn knew she was as red-faced with laughter as any of them, wiping away tears as she gasped for breath as Mick acted out a one-man performance of “Super Michael Man of Steel saving Robo-Nikita from the evil clutches of Paul and Madeline and the Gellman process” even though she knew damn well that none of it had been funny while it was happening, and all of it had been terribly painful for the principals. 

Not to be outdone by the old Section hands, J.B. jumped in to tell the story of the first, and last, time someone hijacked a shipment of MSF supplies in northern Afghanistan after Michael arrived. Michael tracked down the gang leader and wannabe warlord and opened negotiations by hitting him in the face and then jamming his gun into the man’s crotch. He told him, in Persian, he’d blow off his dick unless he turned over the cargo. When the man laughed, Michael shot him in the balls, then holding his gun to the man’s head, asked who the new leader of the group was. Another man stood up and said he thought they could find some working arrangement, and Michael executed the now superfluous former gang leader on the spot. He retrieved the MSF cargo, but at the expense of outraged horror within the MSF world. 

In his own way, J.B. was as good a story teller as Mick, building up the danger and the risk in those early days, the suspense of not knowing who was who, the furious hostility within MSF to Michael’s methods. Under cover of the approving shouts and applause for Michael’s big dick, both real and metaphorical, Quinn rolled her eyes, grimaced, leaned over to Jasmine, and sneered, “He forgot to add that Michael and the new gang leader scripted that entire little show of manly dick waving and shooting beforehand. The deal was assassination in exchange for the goods.”

From there, “Michael and Nikita” stories poured out from all sides, but after a while, after it was clear that all the best stories had been told, people remembered that they were all together, now, because Michael and Nikita hadn’t won. Not this time. That’s when the drinking got really serious and the small knots of old and current friends broke off to tell other stories, more personal and less intelligible to outsiders.

Quinn settled in at a table with Jason and Jasmine and Mintz, just as Jasmine was saying, “I feel bad that I laughed so hard at Mick’s story. I mean, it must have been horrible at the time, but worse is that she’s never fully recovered.”

Quinn shrugged. “No. She recovered. But there have been consequences.”

“What does that mean?”

Quinn opened her mouth to reply, but caught herself before she launched into a story that wasn’t hers to tell. Nikita’s health was her own concern, and it was up to her to share information about it, or not, as she chose. After a moment, and prompted by Jasmine’s worried gaze, she said, “The Gellman Process was an untested combination of micro surgeries, engineered viruses, cortical stimulation and drug therapy. How could there possibly not be life-long consequences?” Quinn winked at Jasmine. “And don’t feel bad. I laughed so hard I nearly pissed myself. I didn’t know either of them then, but I can so totally imagine it happening like that!” She dropped her voice, and in a bad imitation of Michael, or Mick, or Arnold Schwarzenegger, she was too drunk to know which, said, “I’m baaaack.” Then collapsed laughing, along with everyone else at the table.

Their conversation soon drifted away from the past and on to their more current lives, which was fine by Quinn. For one thing, there really wasn’t an easy answer. No one knew if Nikita’s recurrent bouts with vicious migraines were related to the Gellman Process or not, though Nikita absolutely believed that they were. As for the virus that was part of the Gellman Process – and that Nikita and Walter thought they had beaten years earlier – that turned out to be more like meningitis or malaria than smallpox or the measles, going into remission rather than being eliminated. It had flared up again not long after Walter’s death. Michael and Nikita had taken some pains to keep Nikita’s hospitalization for it quiet, and Quinn didn’t need to be the one to drunkenly spill the beans.

Later on, Adam wandered by, trailed by his posse of frustrated lovers, which made everyone at Quinn’s table giggle inanely.

Days afterward, Quinn wondered what sort of blood bath might have erupted had any of the myriad terrorist and/or criminal organizations of Paris had realized what sort of gathering it was, given that nearly everyone there was undoubtedly carrying weapons, legal and illegal both. Eventually she learned that, fearing the same thing, at least three different security agencies had posted discreet perimeter guards.

Jerome had no funeral, but Nikita and Michael took his ashes to be scattered with Josephine’s. No one understood that, not even Quinn. But, after brief arguments they all gave up and acknowledged that Nikita and Michael would do exactly what they thought best and nothing else, just as they always had.

*****

On Saturday, more or less fully recovered from Thursday’s drunken wake, Quinn helped Nikita and Adam load up two big SUVs, preparatory to heading for their cabin in Belgium. 

“Are you sure leaving is the best thing to do right now?” she asked.

“Yes.” Nikita answered, huffing her hair off her forehead as she shoved another duffle into the back. “If we stay here, no one will leave us alone. At the cabin, we’ll have time and space to deal with this in our own way.”

“You really shouldn’t be alone out there – that cabin is kilometers and kilometers away from everything. What if something happens?”

Nikita slammed the back window closed and turned to stare at Quinn. “Like what?”

It was on the tip of Quinn’s tongue to say, ‘like, for example, Michael decides it’s a brilliant idea to eat his gun,’ but one look at the tension around Nikita’s eyes and she said instead, “I don’t know, somebody breaks a leg? Gets sick? Gets lost on the woods?”

“Um hm.” Nikita held her stare for a beat, and Quinn was certain she had somehow heard her thought and not her words, then Nikita turned and headed back inside and Quinn trailed after her.

“A grief counselor is scheduled to come once a week, and so is a family therapist.” Nikita gave the elevator call button a vicious punch. “I don’t want either, but agreeing was the only way to get out of town.” Stepping into the elevator, she went on, “and Michael’s sister and her two girls are coming to stay for a while in a few weeks, and in the meantime Adam and a friend will be there with me.” She grimaced and rolled her eyes at Quinn. “It isn’t, exactly, the ‘alone with Michael and the kids’ that I’d prefer, but it’s the best I’m going to be able to get away with.”

“Adam and ‘a’ friend? How did he choose just one?”

“I have no idea. They must have drawn lots or something.”

“Jason was going on and on about how poly must be catching.”

Nikita snorted. “Adam isn’t poly. He’s twenty-five years old. He takes whatever he’s offered that catches his fancy, and charms the pants off the ones who don’t offer first. And deals with the fallout later.”

“Is he going to be okay?”

“With the fact that his eleven year old sister saved his life, and then died defending him?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know.” The doors slid open and Nikita walked into the apartment without looking back.

Mick showed up just as they were all leaving. In fact Adam was already pulling away from the curb with his friend Marco, Isabella and Gabrielle in one of the two SUVs, when Mick hopped out of a taxi. 

“So,” he said to Quinn, “You’re not going too?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I have a life, Mick. I have a job, friends, a house, and, believe it or not, dogs of my own I need to get back too.”

Mick just looked confused. 

Quinn shook her head and cast her eyes heavenward, hoping for the strength not to slap him. “Heroes and sidekicks, remember? They’re the heroes, and I’m very happy to be a minor character. Now more than ever.”

Nikita came out the front door of their building, followed by Katherine and Sophie, who was leading her father by the hand. Michael was clean but obviously hadn’t shaved since before Margaret’s funeral, and he walked like he was stoned to the gills, though Quinn was pretty sure he wasn’t. Much, anyway.

Michael managed to smile and say hello to them, though his attention kept wandering and he stood in the street next to them like he had already forgotten why he was there. They half shoved, half poured him into the back seat. One he was inside, Sophie crawled in next to him, put her hands on his face, looked into his eyes and said, “Where are we going, Daddy?”

He frowned at her. “To the cabin in Belgium. Don’t you remember?”

Sophie sighed and leaned her forehead against his. “Yes. I do.”

Michael took her head in his hands, and kissed her brow. “Good. Get into your seat and fasten your seatbelt.” He turned and looked out the still open door, more alert than she’d seen him in days. “Thank you Quinn. For everything. I owe you.”

“No. You don’t. Not this time.”

Michael nodded at her, then held out his hand. “Thanks Mick.”

Mick took Michael’s hand between his and clasped it firmly. “No, old man, please don’t. It wasn’t enough. And maybe it was the wrong call.”

Michael shook his head. “No. It wasn’t. Alive, inside the Section, is the same as dead.”

To that there was nothing to say, so Quinn stepped back and gently closed the door.

“Quinn?”

She turned. “Yes, Nikita?”

Nikita’s eyes got glassy for a moment, and then she shook her head sharply. “Can I come, when I need a break?”

Quinn pulled her into a hard tight hug, “Of course.” She stepped back. “Drive safe, and call me when you get there, yeah?”

She and Mick waved them off from the curb, and then she turned to stare at him. “What are you doing here, little man?”

Mick was still staring down the street, watching Nikita drive away. “I’m an informant. I collect information, and I inform.”

Quinn scowled.

Mick went on, “Quite the pillar of strength, our Nikita.”

“Yes.”

“When she stumbles, as she inevitably will, will he wake up enough to catch her?”

“That was always the plan.”

“The plan?” Mick looked at her. “There was a plan?”

Quinn stared incredulously at him for a long moment, and then she rolled her eyes, turned on her heel and left him without saying another word.

*****

Nikita felt some of her tension bleed away as she turned into the long drive at the cabin. She knew, in her head, that simply changing locations wouldn’t change what had happened. But her spirits lifted anyway.

From a distance, especially in the flat, gray light of a late winter afternoon, the cabin looked the same as it had on her first strange trip here with Michael, part quixotic lovers’ getaway, mostly a scheme to flush out yet another high-level traitor in the Section’s ranks. Even so, she had known immediately she wanted to return. She counted it among the great good fortunes of her life that she had.

As she drove closer, she could see more clearly the many alterations, large and small, they had made to the old stone house over all the years since that first, eventful visit. 

Nearly a third of the original structure, the former attached barn, had been virtually abandoned when Michael first brought her here, right down to the unglazed windows in the cellar cow byre and owls in the rafters of the old hay loft. Today not only did the old cow byre have new, larger, glassed-in windows, so did the rest of the old cellar. They had converted the ground floor into bedrooms almost ten years ago. There were more new windows cut into the walls and roof of the old barn space as well, marking her and Michael’s bedroom in the expanded loft area above, and an extra all-purpose room on the main floor. 

Pulling the SUV around to park on the far side of the house, she saw light was streaming out of the French windows that filled the space where the garage doors had once been. The windows opened out onto a snow-covered terrace from the big, farmhouse-style kitchen they had installed, mostly by themselves, the summer Isabella was a year old. To her left rose the separate, multi-bay garage they had added to the property just about five years ago. It had an apartment above, which Adam had largely claimed for himself, and had continued to use even when the rest of the family was away.

It had not been intentional on Nikita’s part, but because the cabin had been in a state of ongoing evolution since before Margaret’s birth, up through their very last visit, there was no space here that was marked as “Margaret’s” alone. Her absence haunted all of them, haunted Nikita, all of the time, but here at the cabin Nikita hoped it would be easier not to have to deal with reality of Margaret’s room, full of Margaret’s things, they way they did in the apartment in Paris.

Adam’s group had arrived already and as she looked around, she saw Isabella and Marco come around the corner of the house, carrying the big ladder for taking the shutters off the upper windows. Judging by the smoke pouring out of the chimneys, Adam was working on the furnace and the fires. Gabrielle was running around outside, making trails in the unbroken snow. 

Nikita turned off the engine and just sat for a moment, enjoying the sudden silence inside the car and letting go of the adrenaline of a long drive. Kate and Sophie had hopped out almost before the engine had stopped running, slamming their doors behind them. In the quiet she looked over at Michael, who had claimed the front passenger seat after their first rest stop. “We’re here,” she said, knowing it was obvious but not knowing what else to say.

He nodded, still staring out the window. “Yes.”

“Margaret would be pissed we left Paris so fast.” That wasn’t what she’d intended to say to him, or even to herself, but, there it was.

He turned to look at her then. “Yes.” He nodded once. “She would.”

Nikita frowned then, something in his tone catching on her ear. “Did you want to stay in Paris?”

“You wanted to leave.”

“If you didn’t want to come, you should have said something.” 

Not that she cared, really. Getting him in particular out of Paris, full of traffic and bridges and people and tall buildings, had been one of her primary goals. It was just easier to manage if he felt more cooperative than not.

“No!” His response was quick, almost angry. “No,” he said again, more gently. “It’s fine. It’s good to be here.” After another minute he opened his door. “I’ll go check on the water.” 

She was carrying in the last of the bags from the car when a furious bellow of “mom!!,” dragged out a hair-raising number of syllables, rose up from the ground floor.

Hurrying down the steps she discovered Kate and Sophie locked in struggle in the doorway to the middle bedroom. Sophie was trying to get in and Kate was hanging onto the doorframe, blocking the way with her body. Nikita voice was sharp with disapproval as she called out, “Hey! What’s going on here?” 

“This is my room this trip!” Sophie gasped, breathless from her continuing efforts to worm past her sister.

Kate, her voice rough and deep from effort and anger, insisted loudly, “No! It isn’t! Margaret and I were supposed to share so that Izzy could have a turn with a single. Just because Margaret’s dead doesn’t mean I don’t get the room.”

Sophie’s voice built towards a furious shriek. “It’s MY turn next for a single.” Suddenly, Sophie drew back enough to glare at Kate, then her expression hardened and, too fast for Nikita to stop it even though she saw it coming, Sophie reached up and pinched the tender flesh on the inside of Kate’s arm, really hard. 

Kate recoiled instantly, pulling her injured arm close with an outraged shriek, then with reflexes Nikita admired in other circumstances, snatched the back of Sophie’s shirt as she tried to dart past and into the room and flung her backwards. Sophie landed butt-first on the carpeted floor of the narrow hallway, sliding until she caromed into the exposed stonework of the old foundation with a solid looking thump. There was a stunned silence, and then she sat up and burst into tears.

Nikita shook her head in disapproval at Kate, still blocking the doorway and looking both abashed and defiant. Then she bent to pull Sophie into her arms, tugging Sophie to her feet and hugging her, still sobbing, against her side.

Isabella’s voice interrupted before Nikita could say anything. “I’ll room with Gabrielle,” she said. “Then Kate and Sophie can each have their own.”

Nikita turned to see Isabella sitting on the bottom step, peering down the hall, Gabrielle huddled behind her. “No,” she said, “You don’t have to do that.”

“I don’t mind,” Gabrielle said, wrapping her arms around Isabella from behind. Isabella flashed Gabrielle an approving smile and patted her arm.

“I know you don’t.” Nikita forced a smile of her own, “but it really is Isabella’s turn to room by herself.” She raked Kate and Sophie with a disapproving glare. “All seven of us shared three bedrooms for the last year, eight of us for the last month, and without this fuss.”

Kate dropped her eyes and shifted her feet, but she also crossed her arms over her chest and hardened her jaw. Sophie just whimpered into Nikita’s side. Nikita repressed a frustrated groan. “I hate to reward either of you after this, but Kate gets the room. Sophie, you’ll share with Gabrielle.”

Three voices burst out nearly at once, “Mom!!”

Nikita pinned Katherine with a hard glance, and watched in satisfaction as her daughter shifted from smug to guilty and uncertain in the blink of an eye. “Kate?”

“Yes?”

“Until Sophie is strong enough to take you on, I expect you to pull your punches.”

“I did! I know!” Kate now looked ready to cry. “I did.”

“Yes. Barely. I saw.” Nikita put her hand on the top of Sophie’s dark head. “As for you. You should have come to me.”

Sophie’s voice was muffled. “It’s MY turn.”

In a stage whisper, Kate muttered resentfully, “Actually, it was Margaret’s turn next.”

“I know the schedule,” Nikita shot another quelling glare Kate’s way before tipping up Sophie’s chin so she could see her tear-stained face. “But, this was NOT the way to handle it.”

She leaned down and brushed a kiss against Sophie’s forehead, drying her cheeks with her thumbs. “We’ll talk about it again after Aunt Genevieve’s visit.” 

Nikita went up the stairs feeling about a thousand pounds heavier than she had when she went down. 

She and Isabella were in the midst of getting a hasty supper together when Michael came in. He called out to tell her that the water was on, but instead of coming into the kitchen, she heard him go up the stairs to their room. When she went up later to tell him the food was ready, he was sitting in a chair by the window, staring out at the dark landscape. 

“Michael?” 

He answered without looking at her. “Yes?”

“Hungry?”

He shook his head. “No.”

She frowned, but turned to leave, when his voice stopped her. “Please don’t send Adam or one of the girls up to ask me again. I’ll come down when I’m ready.”

She looked back to discover that he was staring at her, waiting for her agreement, his expression tight and closed, and pain in the lines around his mouth. She nodded, and let him sit undisturbed. 

Lying sleepless beside him, much later that night, she knew when he got up and slipped down to the kitchen, but she didn’t say anything to him then. She didn’t know when he went back to bed, because Gabrielle came to get her not long after Michael left, to tell her that Sophie was crying in her sleep. Nikita finished what remained of her night curled up around Sophie, soothing her just by being there, reminding herself that she could only manage one day at a time. 

*****

As she tucked Gabrielle into bed two nights later, Gabrielle looked up and with a contented, sleepy sigh, said, “I’m glad things can go back to normal now.”

Nikita nearly choked on a sudden, ferocious, terrifying desire to seize Gabrielle’s shoulders and bellow into her face, ‘how could you be so stupid? Nothing will ever be normal again!’ Barely breathing, reigning in her unexpected fury with every ounce of control she could find, she gently kissed her youngest daughter good night, then fled for the only true privacy she had. 

Her rage at the unfairness of fate had no safe outlet beyond tears, so she let them fall as she stood under the hot stream of the shower. Her shoulders burned from the strain of not holding tightly to someone who was no longer there. The skin of her arms and breasts stung from want of Margaret. She waited with sick anticipation for the awful moment when her tears dried up, leaving the suffocating weight of her grief and her yearning trapped in her chest.

The moment never came. Instead, this time, her misery and heartache spilled outward and swallowed her whole. Wracking cries tore out of her throat and echoed in her ears, loud and ugly over the rushing of the water. Her sobbing shook her so hard her legs failed her and she slid to the floor, banging her elbows and her knees and her head on the way, the fresh sharp pains a welcome icy contrast to the raging storm of her anguish at the loss of her child. 

She had no idea how long she sat, huddled and crying on the floor of the shower, missing Margaret so hard she thought that surely her own heart would stop just to avoid the pain, and then Michael was there. He turned off the water and stepped in and sat down next to her, pulling her into his arms to hold her while she wept convulsively into his shirt.

As her crying at last began to ease, Michael shifted her weight so he could get them up. “Come on. Let’s get dry.” 

In a few minutes he had her tucked into their bed. He disappeared briefly, returning with a bottle of scotch and two glasses. He also put two pills in her hand, which she immediately recognized as her most powerful migraine prescription. He handed her a glass with a couple of fingers of scotch and said, “Take the pills.”

She raised her brows at him, holding up the liquor and the meds. “Is this a good idea?”

“No.” He offered her a tiny, crooked smile and touched her glass with his. “But, after crying like that, you’re going to have a terrible headache. You should make sure you sleep first.”

Michael’s prediction turned out to be accurate. When she finally woke up, muzzy and heavy, the bright sunlight streaming in behind the light curtains made her recoil into the blankets and bury her head. More cautiously opening her eyes from under the protective shadow of a pillow, she realized she was alone and that it had to be long after Gabrielle and Sophie were usually awake. Isabella and Katherine slept the deep morning sleep of teenagers, though, and probably wouldn’t be up and around for at least another hour. Swallowing around the painful lump in her throat, she remembered that Margaret would still be sleeping too, if only she were still here.

Staggering down to the kitchen, wearing sunglasses against the bright glare of the winter day and suppressing groans as her aching abdominal muscles protested the movement, she discovered the cold remnants of breakfast scattered on the table. Following the sound of giggling into the next room, she found Michael sprawled on the couch, Gabrielle and Sophie crawling on top of him, laughing as they tried to provoke him by tickling him while he pretended to fight them off.

“Hey,” she croaked.

Michael took one look at her, then lifted the girls aside and stood up, ignoring their protests and the way their faces fell. “Did you take your meds?” he asked.

She had to think that one through, against the throbbing in her head. “No,” she said, not really surprised. 

He narrowed his eyes in disapproval, then strode past her out of the room. Seeing her daughters’ stricken expressions, Nikita forced a smile. “Dad make crepes this morning?”

Gabrielle beamed gratefully. “Yes. Chocolate ones!”

“Want to watch a movie?” she asked.

When Michael came back with her pills and a mug of tea, she was nestled on the couch, one girl on each side of her, watching the opening credits of one of their favorite Disney films. Michael handed her the meds, waited until she had taken them, said, “I’ll be upstairs if you need me,” and left the room. A minute later she heard his footsteps cross the creaky old boards of the floor above, ending by the chair looking out the window. With an internal scowl, she knew that was probably the last of him they would see today.

*****

Her meds held off the migraine, barely, but fighting it was exhausting. By the end of the evening she was almost shaking she was so tired. Too tired to sleep, it turned out. Rather than disturb Michael with her restless twisting and unwilling to take more pills, she crept down to the study, poured herself a generous brandy and opened her laptop photo files. Starting with Margaret’s infant pictures she began to build new albums, selecting all the images that reminded her of the things about Margaret that she intended to never forget, from her first smile to her last soccer game.

She was so absorbed in her task she nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard Michael’s quiet ‘hi.’ 

“Hi.”

“Here.” He handed her a small bowl of ice cream. “You didn’t eat much at supper.”

Automatically accepting the bowl, she said, “I was still sort of nauseous.” 

Looking at the ice cream in her hands, she realized she was hungry now. She started to eat as he sat down next to her, savoring the creamy frostiness as it slipped down her throat, still feeling as raw and tender as it had the night before after her long bout of sobbing. The leather seat cushions creaked as he settled in and transferred her computer from her lap to his own. 

When her bowl was empty, she set it down and scooted closer to look at the screen. When he didn’t recoil, she leaned into him and dropped her cheek to his shoulder. They didn’t talk, just looked at pictures and snippets of video of Margaret as Michael clicked through them, pausing now and then to study one or another more carefully. When he got to the end, he closed the computer and set it down on the low table in front of the couch, then turned his face toward hers. She could see his grief and his exhaustion in the new lines around his eyes and his mouth, but he didn’t move away, so she closed the short distance between them to kiss his lips. His mouth was soft and yielding and he raised his hands to cradle her head, responding willingly to her advances. She trailed her fingers down his chest to kneed his thigh, then drew her hand up the inside of his leg to brush against his cock, which was as soft and yielding as his lips as she ran her nails over the warm flannel of his pajamas.

Before she had fully processed this unresponsiveness, he pulled her hand away and pushed it gently over her head as he twisted over her, his lips sliding down her jaw, her neck, between her breasts and then, sinking down on his knees on the floor before her, pushing the table aside, skimming up her shirt and dusting her belly with light kisses. 

She said his name, making it a question, as he hooked his fingers in her pajamas and began to pull them down. He kept kissing her belly, so she raised her hips to let him work her clothes off, spreading her knees to give him room, humming in pleasure as he settled his mouth over her clit, his tongue flicking and stroking while he slipped two strong fingers inside her.

Afterwards she was too relaxed and too sleepy to protest as he helped her straighten her clothes, lifted her legs onto the sofa, and covered her up with a soft afghan. She must have fallen asleep immediately, because she never even noticed him leaving. When she woke up in the bright sunlight her computer was back on the desk, the coffee table was in its right place, and her glass and bowl were cleared away.

*****

She actually welcomed the arrival of the first grief counselor later that morning, thinking that they obviously could all use a little help processing Margaret’s death. 

Then Michael refused to leave their bedroom to speak to her. When she tried to insist that he needed it too, he said, thank you, no, he didn’t need a counselor. 

“That’s a load of crap, Michael. You need help every bit as much as the rest of us do. And furthermore,” she went on, her voice rising despite herself, “it would be good for our kids to see you take it seriously!” 

He got up and walked her out of the room, shutting and locking the door behind her. Nikita stared at the closed door for a long moment, re-gathering her shattered nerves, then went to round up the rest of the family.

It did not go well.

Kate took an instant dislike to the therapist and answered every question as obnoxiously as possible, beginning with her name. Then she picked a screaming fight with Sophie about who knew Margaret best. 

Isabella, resembling Michael more than ever, sat stone-faced and silent for about fifteen minutes of her sisters’ argument, when she stood up and walked out of the room without a backward glance. 

Gabrielle burst into tears and crawled into Nikita’s lap, burying her face in Nikita’s shoulder. 

As soon as it was polite to do so, Adam fled to town with Marco in tow. 

When she told Michael about it, after picking the lock to get back into their bedroom in the early evening, he shrugged and said, “What did you expect?”

She figured it was either a great triumph of will, or a sign of emotional exhaustion, or both, that she did not yell or smash things in response.

The noise of Adam’s SUV coming up the drive woke Nikita from a fitful doze in the early hours of the following morning. Sitting up, she realized Michael had never come to bed. He was still in the chair by the far window, staring bleakly out into the night. After she watched Marco pull a staggeringly drunk Adam out of the passenger seat of the car and through the door to the apartment stairs, she said, “You should try to get some sleep.” 

He looked up at her, “I know.” 

But he hadn’t joined her before she fell asleep again.

Marco came into the main cabin for lunch, but they didn’t see Adam until nearly two o’clock the following afternoon.

*****

“Thanks for doing the dishes.”

Adam looked up from the sink with a wary smile. “You’re welcome. Thanks for cooking.”

Nikita forced a chuckle as she headed for the refrigerator. Pulling out the open bottle of white wine and refilling her glass, she said, keeping her voice as casual as she possibly could, “you talk with your dad today?”

“Ah.” Adam turned around and leaned back against the counter, drying his hands on a towel. “I wondered why I was being thanked for following the chore chart you posted on the fridge.”

Nikita shrugged and lifted the corner of her mouth in a half smile of acknowledgement.

“And the answer is no.”

Nikita raised her eyes to his. “Would you, tonight?”

Adam looked startled. “What? Like, now?”

“Yeah?”

“About what?”

“Anything? How you’re doing? How’s he doing? The weather?”

He shook his head. “I know you’re worried about him. We all are. But…” Adam trailed off.

“But?” She prompted, after a longish pause.

Adam turned back to the sink and picked up another plate to scrape. “But, he’ll be fine. He doesn’t need or want any of us hovering over him.”

“Not hovering. Just, say hi?”

“Fine. After I finish here I’ll go say hi.”

*****

“Again,” Nikita said, bringing her hands, protected by heavy pads, back into position.

Panting, Isabella nodded, then swung into the sequence again, kicking and punching as Nikita backed slowly around the mat.

“Good. Good.” She raised her hands. “Again. Harder this time.”

Isabella’s eyes widened slightly, but then she took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and did the sequence again. Harder.

Nikita grinned. “Good!” She dropped her hands. “Take a break.” She turned to look at Kate. “Your turn.”

Nikita hadn’t intended to start training with Isabella and Katherine, but she was enjoying it now that they had begun. The afternoon after their first, disastrous meeting with the grief counselor, she had retreated, alone, to the garage and the heavy bag there, taking her frustration out on it instead of her family. She had looked up to see Isabella watching her. And then Iz had said, “Can you show me how to do that?”

She and Michael hadn’t intended for one of the bays in their new garage to morph into a small gym either, complete with mats, free weights and a bag. It had happened slowly, item by item, until one rainy day Michael and Adam, sparing with sticks, chased each other (they would never say who was pursued and who was pursuing) across the open floor and smashed in the drivers’ side window of Nikita’s much-treasured Mercedes roadster; memento, memory and warning from another life. At that point, they had accepted the obvious and put up a partition wall. 

The day after Nikita started teaching Isabella some of the basics of kickboxing, Kate showed up and asked to learn too. They’d been at it for almost a week now. The girls were quick students, which wasn’t surprising. They had been training in and around the marital arts, in a low-key and somewhat haphazard way, all their lives. Michael and Nikita had never made an issue of it, instead letting their children watch and participate in their workouts when and how they wanted, and sending them off to children’s classes whenever there was a place they found they liked. Margaret, naturally, had been their most ferocious student. Soccer was her first love, but while they were in Cambodia she had followed some of her soccer teammates into a kickboxing school. It turned out she had the personality and the physicality for the sport, even taking ribbons in a handful of competitions before they left.

Isabella and Kate, in contrast, had drifted away almost entirely from any formal training at all after a sequence of tae kwon do classes several years earlier they hadn’t enjoyed. Instead they occasionally watched Nikita and Michael train, or some of Michael’s MSF staff, sometimes willing to come out and spar for a while, but usually fading away before it came to that. Michael and Nikita hadn’t been thrilled, but decided it was something that shouldn’t be forced. Both girls were careful, observant and smart, and it had been a straightforward proposition to train them to hone those talents, mostly without them even being aware of it as training. 

Nikita raised her hands. “Again.”

As Kate began to push her backwards, Nikita saw Michael come into the workout area. As they moved into the middle of the sequence, Michael called out, “harder.”

Kate flicked her gaze toward her father in surprise, then looked at Nikita with a question in her eyes. Nikita nodded and they continued, Michael adding his commentary from the side. Soon he was out on the mat, repositioning Kate’s arms, adjusting her stance, and generally driving her close to tears of angry frustration. Finally she muttered, “Why do I have to learn to do this anyway? Doesn’t a gun make all this wasted effort?”

Michael stilled, and the hairs on Nikita’s arms prickled at the way the tension in the air shot up about a thousand percent. After looming over Kate for a moment, he walked over to the rear wall of the garage and opened the gun cabinet, pulling out a nine millimeter. He rummaged for a clip, slammed it into the gun, and said, “here,” as he tossed it to Kate, who caught it automatically, gaping in surprise at her father. He said, “It’s empty. Try to shoot before I get to you.”

“Dad?”

“You can’t hurt me.”

Kate held the gun down at her side, her eyes wide.

“If you can’t raise that gun, it doesn’t matter that you have it.” His tone was perfectly reasonable, but an underlying menace reminded Nikita all too well of her early days of training as a recruit. She fleetingly considered and as quickly rejected the notion of intervening. This lesson was essential and Kate had provided a nearly perfect opening, even if Michael was going to overplay it.

Kate squared her shoulders and started to raise the gun, her arm trembling slightly, but before she’d hardly gotten it into position, Michael had crossed the floor and kicked her square in the abdomen, seizing her gun arm as she collapsed inward, breaking her grip on the gun and tossing it aside, sending it clattering across the concrete floor. He used their momentum to spin her around and slam her up against the wall, his forearm in her throat. He met her eyes in a long stare. “How useful was your gun?” 

Kate, wide-eyed in shock, could only manage to shake her head a tiny fraction as she struggled weakly to push her father’s arm away from her neck. That was when Nikita realized he wasn’t just holding Kate still, he actually had her feet off the ground and was really pushing against her windpipe, which sent her flying across the floor to knock him away from their daughter with a sharp elbow jab into his side. “Michael! What the hell are you doing?”

Michael glared at her as Kate sagged to the floor, gasping for breath and holding her stomach. 

Her blood pounding and her hands shaking, Nikita yelled, “You were crushing her windpipe! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Michael blinked, and Nikita watched awareness, shock, shame and anger chase their way across his face as he took in Kate curled up on the ground at their feet. He stepped back, spun on his heel and strode out of the garage.

Nikita dropped to the ground beside Kate and helped her to sit up. “Izzy, hand us some water, please?”

As Kate swallowed, leaning against Nikita and wincing as her throat muscles worked against the fresh bruises, Nikita hugged her close and wondered if they were all going to survive this.

“Mom?” Isabella asked.

“Yeah?”

“What was that?”

“I don’t know.” Nikita sighed and pressed her lips to Kate’s temple. Resting her cheek on Kate’s hair, she said, “But it’s time to find out.”

She found him upstairs, standing still and staring out his new favorite window, his hands locked behind him, parade-rest style.

She shut the door with a not-quite slam. “What the hell?”

Michael, who had obviously been expecting her, handed her the tablet he was holding. As she took in the data in the top files, all the sympathetic understanding she’d been working up to offer him vanished in a wave of angry shock. “You’ve been sitting up here, tracking Section activities.”

“Yes.”

She looked up from the data, but he wouldn’t turn to meet her face-to-face, guilty son-of-a-bitch that he was. “Despite our agreement that you wouldn’t.”

“We can’t protect ourselves if we don’t know what they’re up to.”

She made no attempt to keep her incredulous disgust out of her voice. “And is that your excuse for hitting Katherine?”

He turned his head to look at her then. “We assumed they could do the job. They can’t. Their success rate for cold-ops is barely fifty-two percent.”

She felt like he’d just kicked her in the solar plexus too. Scrolling fast through his data, seeing nothing that she could question, she muttered, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No.”

She looked back up at him, shaking her head as she put it all together. “That’s why they offered you command of Section two weeks ago. Fucking assholes! Why should you have to clean up their mess?” 

And he had nearly shot them in the face for their trouble. Now she wished she hadn’t stopped him. She handed him back his PDA, all her anger with him thoroughly redirected towards the incompetent bastards running the Agency. How dare they even approach him with their own problems, and only days after Margaret’s death? Which was also entirely their fault! “Can’t they see all the ways that wouldn’t work? You’re as compromised as I am. More, even!”

She did not like at all the way her voice had wavered at the end there. He was probably one of the few people on the planet who could fix their stupid, shitty, self-created problems, and the thought made her shiver in a cold wind that was entirely inside her head.

“Why was the gun cabinet nearly empty?”

The abrupt change in subject gave her needed time to regroup. “Adam is obsessed with teaching Marco how to use each gun. They’ve been going out to the far pasture, using that old range you and Adam built when he was a kid.”

His face went blank with surprise. “Oh.” 

She shrugged, still surprised herself by this development. “Yeah. I know.”

He tilted his head in acknowledgment, and then turned his gaze back out the window. 

Talking about the guns had given her time to remind herself that she was also one of the select few who might be able to deal with the mess the Sections were in, but that hell would freeze over before she did. “Their problems are their own, Michael, and not ours.”

He didn’t answer, didn’t even turn his head, and she welcomed back the warm rush of anger at his obstinacy. She turned to leave, stopping at the door to say, “You should apologize to Katherine.”

“For showing her the limits of a handgun?”

“You nearly crushed your thirteen-year old daughter’s windpipe.” She paused, then added, “Luckily, you have a lot of experience apologizing for the inexcusable.”

She wasn’t certain, in the growing dark of their room, but she was pretty sure he flinched. 

*****

After an almost sleepless night spent worrying about how to keep her family from ripping itself apart from strain, Nikita called a morning meeting and announced that starting the next Monday, the girls were going back to school.

There was a startled silence, then Isabella said, “What about Aunt Genevieve’s visit?”

“She and your cousins won’t even be here for two more weeks. That’s too long to wait to get back on some sort of routine.” 

Depending on where they were living and what options were available, like Adam before them, the girls sometimes attended actual schools, sometimes did their work at home through one of the many internet options, and most often a little of both. 

Today, Isabella and Katherine exchanged another quick look, then Isabella spoke again. “We’d like to try the school in town. You know, the one with the big sports fields we pass on the way to the supermarket.” 

Adam interrupted, “The work won’t be in English, we’re in the French speaking part of Belgium.”

Kate snapped, “Yeah. Duh. We know!” Then she turned to look at Nikita and Michael with a bright, earnest smile. “We went to a French language school in Cambodia, so it should be easy to transfer our work.”

Gabrielle broke in, “I want to go to that school too, mom.”

Nikita was pleased. Despite how much the driving into town twice a day, nearly forty minutes each way, was going to suck, this was her preferred solution. It was a huge relief the girls had already chosen it for themselves. But one person hadn’t spoken up yet. “Sophie?”

Sophie had been staring at the tabletop, but now she looked up with a pleading expression. “Can I home school? Please?”

Nikita looked at Michael, but they couldn’t reach a quick, silent agreement, so Nikita said, “We’ll talk about it and get back to you. Everyone get dressed and be at the car in thirty minutes. We’re going to get registered and shop for school supplies today.”

The next afternoon Nikita was coming down from the loft just as Sophie erupted from the basement stairs, Kate hard on her heels and bellowing at the top of her lungs, “You stole my bracelet! You fucking little thief!!!”

Catching sight of Michael, who must have come from the kitchen, Sophie quickly ducked behind him, shrieking, “Daddy! Daddy! Save me! She’s going to kill me!”

Kate skidded to a stop, her chest heaving from exertion and emotion. She spat, “I’m not going to kill you, you stupid little twit. I’m going to beat the crap out of you.” Then she suddenly lunged forward, flailing her arms and growling, “Rwarrr!!!” 

Sophie shrieked again and clung tighter to Michael’s waist.

Nikita looked at Michael, and together they reached an effortless, instantaneous and mutual decision that Sophie could home school while her sisters went to town without her.

*****

Driving the already familiar route home from the girl’s school the following Friday afternoon, Nikita listened to Katherine and Gabrielle’s happy chatter and smiled in satisfaction. Gabrielle had already located at least three new best friends and was thrilled with everything, but especially lunch and recess, when there was time to talk and play with other kids her own age. Kate, also a quick adapter, was full of new information about the latest bands and movies to catch the attention of Belgian seventh graders. Both girls also approved of their new physical education teacher, whom all the grades shared, and as they told each other stories they had heard about her from new classmates, Nikita glanced over at Isabella. “You’re being quiet. How was your day?”

“Fine.”

“You realize I am going to keep on asking until you tell me more than that, right?” 

Nikita caught her eye when Iz turned to look at her in exasperation, and winked.

Iz managed a weak grin. “Yeah. Okay.”

While Isabella began to talk, slowly at first and then with mounting enthusiasm as she began to describe upcoming projects in her new classes, Nikita congratulated herself, again, on a job well done. All three of them seemed to be off to an excellent beginning. Dressed anonymously in the same uniforms as everyone else, and without the notoriety of looking as out of place as they had in Cambodia, or anyone’s awareness of Margaret or her murder, they were just three girls, recently moved to the area and new to school. They clearly found it a huge relief.

The driving hadn’t been nearly as awful as she feared, either, especially because Adam and Marco had taken over more than half of it. Fortunately, Nikita and the girls all liked Marco. Adam had met him bicycling in Spain a few years earlier, and in the dark it would be hard to keep them straight, their build and size was so similar. In the light it wasn’t a problem at all. Marco had a round, cheerful, open face and a bright toothy smile, and he laughed easily and often. He was halfway through a graduate program in chemical engineering, and was a restful person to be around. 

With Adam and Marco’s help with all the driving, Nikita had not only been able to get Sophie going on her own program, she’d even begun returning her own vast backlog of phone calls and messages. She didn’t want to actually talk to very many people yet, so she stuck to email, but, it was a beginning.

*****

Nikita smiled and tipped her re-filled glass to Marco. “Thanks.”

Marco topped off his own wine, flashing his infectious smile. “You’re welcome. Besides, it was fun to take a big group of teens to the movies. I’m the youngest kid in my family, so I’ve never been the big brother before.”

“When you all got home, Isabella and Katherine looked happy. And they said they liked the movie.”

“I think they had a good time. Or, at least.” Marco shrugged charmingly and grinned conspiratorially, “there was a lot giggling.” After taking a sip of his drink, he asked, “How did Gabrielle’s friend’s visit go?”

“Good. She seems like a nice kid.”

Adam walked into the kitchen then and came to lean against the counter next to Marco. As he often was, he was just close enough to leave the clear impression that they were lovers, without ever stooping to, or allowing, anything that might possibly be construed as a public display of affection. 

“How did Sophie do?” Adam asked.

Trust Adam to go right to the difficult heart of the matter, Nikita thought. She said, “Okay. She was too shy to go outside with Gabrielle and her friend by herself, so I went out with them.” Nikita smiled, recalling the afternoon’s somewhat muddy snow battle. “It was fun, playing in what’s left of the winter!”

“Did dad come downstairs at all, while Gabrielle’s guest was here?”

Something in Adam’s tone made her straighten up, even as she answered as casually as she could. “No.”

Adam nodded sharply. “Of course not.”

Nikita frowned, but said nothing.

“Do you know what he’s doing, up there, all day, every day?” He jerked his chin up, indicating their bedroom on the floor above.

“He’s working.” 

Adam raised a skeptical brow. “On what?”

“MSF projects, budgets, planning, a little crisis negotiation. The usual.” Nikita waved her hand airily, dismissing the question. It was true, more or less. He had started taking J.B.’s phone calls again. He had spent part of the week engaged in the kind of complex negotiations of give and take with local leaders that were the core of what he really did to secure MSF missions. He’d also spent a good deal of his time, as far as she could tell, staring off into space. This was, she discovered, preferable to the one afternoon he had announced he was going to take a walk and then terrified her by being gone, on foot, for eight hours, without his phone. Arriving home long after dark had fallen, mouthing casual and obviously unfelt apologies for frightening her. 

Adam folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. “And all of it is so important he can’t take a turn on the driving, or helping with Sophie’s home school?”

“He did help out with Sophie.”

“One afternoon out of five! By watching a bunch of football games with her! Sophie doesn’t even like football. Hell, she cringes and ducks if a soccer ball comes anywhere near her! It was Margaret who loved football!”

Marco tossed back his wine, then cleared his throat. “I think I’ll be going out to the apartment now. Good night.” He set his glass down next to the sink, and headed for the front door.

In the silence that followed, Nikita watched Adam stare at his toes. He looked lost and angry, and a little bit like the lonely nine-year old he’d been when she and Michael had finally begun their lives together. Her heart hurt for him, but she didn’t have any words at all to give him. What she really wanted to do was offer a hug, but she could see from the set of his shoulders it would be as unwelcome right now as it had been then. After a long few moments, he looked up and shrugged. “The Mediterranean flair for public emotions escaped Marco entirely. He hates scenes. I should go out and let him know there wasn’t one. See you in the morning.” 

As he walked past her, he reached out and brushed the tips of his fingers against her shoulder. “Good night, mom.”

He was gone before she could respond.

*****

Kate’s voice caught Nikita’s attention when she walked into the garage with an armload of recycling. 

“Just once, that’s all I want.”

“Once is all you’ll get.” Adam’s voice carried a hint of laughter as well as threat. “You haven’t taken any training seriously enough to do better.”

“How long would it take?”

“To touch him? I could show you one or two moves right now that should work. Once. To get through Dad’s defenses regularly? Years.”

“Arrrgghhh!” Kate wailed. Her voice got serious sounding again. “Can you?”

“Can I what?”

“Take dad?”

There was a pause, and then Adam said, “yes, but not always. He’s still really quick.”

“Still?”

Nikita shot around the partition wall to see Michael standing at the back of the workout area, staring down Adam and Kate.

Michael pushed himself off the wall, stripping off his jacket and hat, and ambled out onto the training floor. There was something loose and dangerous in his movements that made the hairs on the back of Nikita’s neck stand up. He said, “try.”

Adam frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Try to drop me.”

Adam stepped back and folded his arms. “No.”

Michael’s tone was perfectly reasonable, but his eyes were cold. “You told Kate you could. Prove it.”

“Prove what, dad?” There was something new, something a little taunting and hard, in Adam’s voice. “That I’m thirty years younger than you?”

“If you can.” Michael raised his hands and faced Adam, who after a long beat, raised his own and started moving into the center of the mat.

Nikita launched herself between them. Her heart pounding furiously, she held out her hands, trying to ward them back and way from her, away from each other. “No. No. This is not going to happen.” 

Adam was circling now too, forcing Nikita to pivot to keep her eyes on both of them. He said, light and mocking, and underneath, angry, oh, so angry, “Oh come on, mom. Let him try.”

“I’m not the one with something to prove,” Michael said.

“Kate!” Nikita called. “Go get Marco, and tell him to bring the car keys. Right now.”

Kate vanished, and Nikita heard her running up the stairs to the apartment above. Adam and Michael spun lazily around her, and Michael said, “Nikita. You should get out of the way.”

She turned and squared up in front of him, raising her own hands. “Make me.”

“Nikita!” Adam’s voice was sharp and he was openly angry now. “This isn’t about you. Get out of the way.”

Nikita kept her eyes on Michael’s, moving her feet to keep facing him and her body between him and Adam. “No. Neither one of you is in any state to do this.”

Marco came hustling into the garage, Kate hard at his heels. “What’s happening?” he asked.

“Marco.” Nikita didn’t turn her eyes away from Michael’s as she answered. “Please take Adam out of here. Into town, back to Paris if you have too, but take him away. Right now.”

Nikita risked a glance at Marco and saw his jaw drop in surprise, then some sense of what was happening must have come to him for he moved toward Adam, and Nikita returned her concentration to Michael. She heard Marco speaking urgently under his breath, and Adam answering angrily and loudly, but she kept her focus completely on Michael. He was still poised and loose, ready to strike, but he had come to a stop and was obviously watching Adam and Marco.

There was scuffling and more hissed angry words behind her, and then she heard Marco call out, “We’re going. I’ll phone later.” 

The outer door slammed shut after them, and as Michael turned his gaze back to her, Nikita said, “Kate, go into the house and all of you stay there until I come inside.”

She left without a sound, and Nikita was alone with Michael, who started stalking her again. She gaped in disbelief, nearly dropping her hands in surprise. “You really want to spar, right now, with me?”

“Yes.”

“Fine.”

So they did. Nikita was glad that she’d been working out for a few weeks already, because Michael was still a formidable opponent. He wasn’t in the field nearly as often as he had once been, and for the most part MSF security teams didn’t engage with anyone, ever. They worked behind the scenes to keep connections open, staying abreast of their situations and serving as visible reminders to all and sundry to not mess with the missions and people under their care. But their presence was only as effective as anyone believed in their resolve and their skills. So they trained openly and constantly, Michael right along with them.

He was barely in control, but the dark thing swirling between him and Adam didn’t enter into this between them. The match ended when she dropped him, mostly because he got winded more quickly than she did, thanks to spending most of a month more or less checked out from the world around him.

Sitting on his chest, holding him to the mat with her weight, she asked, “Want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“How are you going to handle it?”

“I’ll deal with it.”

“I hope so.”

She stood up and offered him a hand, pulling him to his feet. They walked back to the house without speaking. Once inside he immediately retreated upstairs and left her to face their children on her own. It made her wish she’d hit him a lot harder when she had him on the mat.

Many hours later, Nikita slipped back into bed after another of her middle-of-the-night wanders through the house. She was too wound up to sleep but she was afraid of the heavy slumber and slow waking that meds produced, she didn’t know what crisis she might be called to next. So she had tiptoed through the cabin, looking in on her sleeping children, counting heads, checking that they were still breathing, and carefully not looking for the one she knew wasn’t there. 

Then, for the first time, the cold night air and the silent house reminded her of the Section in the quiet hours of the night watch, when she’d paced out her anxieties and walked through her insomnia. Furious with herself for even thinking the comparison she had fled up the stairs to their room. Settling in on her back and telling herself that this time she would stay still until she went to sleep, Michael rolled over and looked at her. “You’re not sleeping well.”

She met his eyes, dark in the dim starlight that was all that lit their room. “No. I’m not.”

“Can I help?”

She examined him as carefully as she could in the dark, uncertain what to make of his offer. “How?”

“Help you relax?” His voice was thick with sour mockery, but his hand on her hip was firm and warm and made her skin ache for more. 

A toxic sludge of old bile and new grief rushed at the back of her throat even as she arched into his kiss, tasting tears and blood, his or hers, real or remembered, it didn’t matter and she didn’t care. 

There was no teasing, and no foreplay. Michael pushed her onto her back, helped her wiggle out of her long underwear, shoved down the front of his pajamas and thrust inside her. It was so sudden she was hardly wet at all and the dry friction of his first few strokes made her eyes water from the peculiar pleasure pain. Within seconds, though, she was slick and open and he was driving into her hard and fast, muscles bunching under her hands and his breathing ragged in her ear. When he sagged against her after he came, she was still pulsing and aching from arousal, twisting against him in frustration. He slid out and off to her side, catching her wrists and pinning her arms above her head with one hand while he brought her off with the other, his fingers working her clit until she cried out in relief and release. She fell asleep tucked up against his chest, his arm wrapped around her, holding her close, keeping her warm. 

When she opened her eyes in the grey dawn light, she saw him pulling on running pants and a long-sleeved workout shirt. She sat up so abruptly her head swam a bit, which she ignored. “Can I come with you?”

Only a plain refusal could have stopped her, and maybe not even then. He didn’t say anything at all, so she scrambled for her clothes.

*****

Adam and Marco hadn’t gone to straight Paris, but they did leave a few days later, vacating the garage apartment for Michael’s sister Genevieve and her two daughters, Caroline and Marjorie.

Hugging Adam goodbye before they left, Nikita asked, “are you going to deal with it, whatever it is, between you and your dad?”

His attempt at a reassuring smile was more like a grimace when he leaned in to kiss her forehead. “Yes, mom.”

“And take care of yourself too?”

“Yes, mom.” Adam’s smile widened into his more familiar teasing grin as he sighed theatrically, casting his eyes upward in an appeal to a heavenly figure Nikita was reasonably certain he didn’t much believe in. Obviously sensing this wasn’t actually very reassuring, Adam grew more serious and continued. “It’s called PTSD. I’ve been listening to people tell me how to deal with it since I was six years old. I could lead workshops on how to deal with PTSD. I know what I have to do. I’m doing what I need to do.”

“Okay.” She hugged him one more time and stepped back. “Call if-“

He interrupted her, “you too.”

*****

Genevieve handed Nikita a steaming mug before sitting down beside her at the big kitchen table. “Tell me. Tell me everything.”

Nikita inhaled the heavy, rich scent of the hot chocolate in her hands, enhanced by the faint bitter notes of Kahlua. “There’s not that much to tell.” 

Genevieve raised her beautifully shaped eyebrows in an expression of dramatic unbelief.

Nikita tried laughter. “Really! It’s less than a week since we last talked on the phone. The only news since then is that you and your girls arrived safely!”

Genevieve shook her head in disapproval. “Nikita. It’s not about new things happening, it’s about the act of talking.”

Nikita sighed, and blew across her mug to cool the liquid enough to sip. “Just how much reading on ‘comforting the bereaved’ did you do, anyway?”

Genevieve laughed gaily. “I looked through everything at the book shop, and the internet.” She sobered then, and lifted her shoulder in an elegant shrug. “Also my own experiences. Michael and I were alone after our parents died, and he was a teenaged boy and, already,” she waved her hand, “himself about grief.”

Nikita snorted, “You mean, closing down and shutting everyone else out?” 

Silently, deep in the privacy of her own head, she added ‘while wallowing in guilt and maudlin self-pity, spiked with a suicidal disregard for the well being of self and loved ones?’

“Yes.” Genevieve smiled briefly. “And then, when he ‘died’ in prison, I was in the care of another very young man. Well-meaning, wonderful, so kind, so loving, but,” she shook her head in fond memory, “so young. Which meant I did not fully grieve for any of them until after Rene died. Then, it all hit at once, very, very hard.”

Nikita sipped her coco, letting the burn on her tongue take the pain and guilt of Rene’s death. When they had reached out to Genevieve and her family some fifteen years ago, she had wanted to tell her about Rene, tell her who Rene was and how Rene had died, and confess that she had been the one to kill him. In fact, now that she was thinking on it, with an ever-green appreciation for all of Section’s monstrous ironies, she had killed Rene to save Michael from himself when he had been stuck in an earlier bender of guilt-and-grief fueled, reckless self-endangerment. 

Michael had asked her not to take that step, for the sake of Genevieve’s memories of the man who had been her only living family for almost ten years. She had regretted not telling Genevieve ever since. The secret was so heavy, and the weight only grew with time. That she had subsequently stood her ground on not keeping secrets from their children did not lessen the burden of this one.

Genevieve went on, “I nearly lost myself, my marriage, everything then. Poor Henri! He did not know what had become of his cheerful, always strong, wife. Someone had taken her in the night and put a strange, morbid, weeping, frail creature in her place.” Genevieve shook her finger at Nikita. “So, I tell you now. Talk. And keep talking. Over and over again. To yourself, if to no one else.”

Nikita knew Genevieve was right. How could she not know? On the outside chance that five weeks of family therapists and grief counselors hadn’t made it clear, her entire life was one long adaptation to loss. Before the Section, in the Section, and all the years after, coping with grief was the constant. On her own, on the streets, denial was the only way to go. She had paid a high price, though, in unacknowledged vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities later exploited ruthlessly by Madeline. And by Michael. 

The Section itself, under Paul Wolfe’s command anyway, had operated on the theory that grief, like any other human reaction, could be plotted, manipulated, and, most importantly, scheduled and contained. 

MSF was not like that at all. If anything, it was a fun-house mirror image of what the Section had been. Grieving and the need to grieve were, if not celebrated exactly, held to be a central facet of the lives of the volunteers and career workers alike. Everyone was an amateur grief counselor; everyone had a personal story or stories to tell.

By choosing to have a large family, and to keep that family in the field with them, she and Michael had to some degree insulated themselves from that aspect of life with the MSF. They were neither blind nor stupid, however, and they both had absorbed the major tenets of how to cope with grief from their friends and colleagues and co-workers. Friends and co-workers who even now were reaching out to embrace them, pull them into supportive communities whether or not they wanted it. A huge percentage of the messages she’d received since she had fled to the cabin were from friends and colleagues, calling to offer an ear or a shoulder, sharing stories about Margaret, practically begging to come cook, or clean, or run errands. She was sure that Michael’s messages were filled with the same. Genevieve herself had called every three days, like clockwork, just to check in.

Nikita had only held all offers at bay because Adam and Marco were there, and then Genevieve and her daughters had arrived within days of Adam and Marco’s departure for Paris. 

Nikita looked up, startled, at the sound of Genevieve clearing her throat. She realized, ruefully, that she had sunk into a fit of abstraction. “Right. Okay. Sophie. Let’s talk about Sophie.”

Genevieve smiled in encouragement and Nikita spilled out her concerns and worries. Sophie’s adjustment to the new world they were all living in was proving particularly hard going. She wasn’t clingy, exactly, unless she was running from Kate, of course, but she’d gone from a cheerful if somewhat dreamy little girl who played with her toys and her dolls and her sisters for hours on end, to a pale and watchful loner who stayed just out of arms reach. When she wasn’t picking fights. 

It didn’t take Sophie especially long to whip through each day’s assignments on the fourth grade online curriculum they selected for her, though this was producing some head butting with her father over sloppy and careless work. This in turn meant she spent too much of each afternoon ghosting through the house, perfecting her ‘play with me for I am a lost soul’ expression. But, when Nikita offered play cards with her, or read aloud, or do their nails, or even, in desperation, to pay her for her help with extra chores, Sophie would promptly vanish. “Of course,” Nikita finished, “if I don’t see her around, it turns out she’s hiding out in either Kate or Isabella’s room, playing electronic games on a hand held.”

Genevieve smiled sympathetically. “All to be expected. Anyway, I think you’re doing fine with her. With all your girls. It’s really you, and Michael, I’m worried about.”

“Us? Why?” 

Nikita was genuinely startled, not so much at the sentiment, but that Genevieve was being so uncharacteristically blunt about it, and flatly refusing to rise to the red herring of Sophie’s situation. 

“Since he came back, since I met you, you two have been always together. For more than fifteen years, always so close together, always looking to each other, always touching each other. Now? I know we have only been here little more than three days, but I haven’t seen you and him in the same room at all, except for meals, and while he still watches you, you don’t look at him at all.”

“He sits right next to me at supper! If I looked at him the whole time I couldn’t eat!”

Genevieve tapped her fingernail sharply on the table. “That’s not what I mean and you know it.”

Nikita sipped her cooling drink, giving herself time to compose an answer. Because she did know what her sister-in-law meant. Though she was taken aback that it was, apparently, so obvious to a sympathetic observer. She wanted to be better than that.

The truth was that she was so strenuously guarding her tongue, so valiantly holding in all the ugly, hurtful, angry versions of ‘why the fuck did you bring us all back to Paris?’ that filled her head and heart, she had no room left to say anything to him at all. 

She knew that he was lacerating himself with his own guilt, knew he was drowning in his own grief, but she had no line to throw him. She never had. Not in the past, when everything she had managed to say had ended up sounding like, “I told you so,” or, “What did you expect?” And not now, not when it was taking everything she had not to push him under herself. 

As for him, well, silence had always been Michael’s refuge of choice. He would not rage at her, he would not cry for her, he would not even meet her eyes, too afraid to see his own bitter judgment on his failures reflected back from her to him.

Instead, they’d kept sparring. They slipped out to the garage at dawn, in unspoken agreement that no one needed to be watching. She held nothing back and he took it all without a sound; every bruise, every scrape, every cut, every strain. And repaid her by fucking her hard and fast in the darkest part of the night, all teeth and muscles and finger-shaped bruises on her hips and thighs. Or he slipped in behind her when she was in the shower, pressing her tight against the wall and holding her up through orgasms that buckled her knees. At meals they sat side by side, their knees just touching, their feet pressed together, under the table, out of sight. And other than the business of the day, they didn’t talk at all.

For now, this all they had to offer each other. For now, this would have to do. Nikita swallowed and looked up to meet Genevieve’s kind, worried gaze. “You’re right. We’re in a hard place. But, I promise, we are dealing with it, best we can.”

*****

“Genevieve? Ready?” Michael walked into the kitchen, carrying his coat.

Genevieve looked up from the table, where she had just spread out her latest needlework project, showing Nikita the colors and the pattern she had selected for a new set of dinning room chair cushions. “Ah, Michael! I’d forgotten about our walk! I’ve just laid everything out!” She glanced toward Nikita, then back at her brother, her expression bright and bland. “Could Nikita join you instead?”

Nikita looked up at Michael and saw him blink, then he looked at her and shrugged, smiling in fond resignation as he gestured at his sister with a slight tilt of his head. 

She looked at her sister-in-law and said, “you will never, ever win a prize for subtle.” 

Genevieve opened her eyes wide in a very good approximation of shocked denial, and Nikita laughed as she pushed back her chair and stood up. “I’m going. We’re going. We’ll talk.”

They had walked for almost a mile along the muddy, early spring trail before Nikita finally broke the silence. “Have you made a decision about the reception in Paris next week, the UN Human Rights Commission one?”

“We should go.”

“Yes.” She glanced over and in the bright mid-day light she could see how drawn and tired he still was. “Annalisa made hotel reservations for us.”

He looked at her then, holding her eyes for a brief second before looking back to the trail winding away in front of them. “That was thoughtful of her.”

“Yes. But we could stay at the apartment, if you’d rather.”

He kept his eyes on the path. “No.”

That was good. She didn’t want to stay there either. “We have to at least stop by. The girls have lists of things they want, and all our evening gear is there.”

“Okay.”

“If we’re going, I’d like to schedule some meetings for myself. The report on the Cambodian project is overdue.”

He answered sharply, “We’re going.”

“Fine.”

After a few more minutes of walking in silence, he asked, “Do you want your meetings before or after?”

“Before.”

“Fine.”

When they were almost in sight of the house, she said, “I want to take my car.”

He shrugged. “Then you should drive.”

She had expected that. All his years riding in the back of the van, working, had taught him the value of chauffeurs. Which was all very well, right up to the moment she realized she should go ahead and buy herself the damn cap, at which point she usually quit driving him anywhere, on principle. He would drive as long as she stayed vigilant, but the minute she slacked off, her driving time went up and his went down. The only exception was his motorcycles, which he would take by preference almost anywhere, in almost any weather. But there was no way she was going to take a motorcycle trip in the cool, rainy spring weather, or get out of doing most of the driving on this trip either, so she might as well drive her own damn car. “Fine. But then I get to choose the music.” 

Her voice sounded far more petulant and aggrieved than she’d intended, and she held back her wince only by assuming a hard stare. 

He stopped and looked at her again, managing to appear baffled by her vehemence, then the corners of his lips began to rise in a faint, teasing smile and his eyes glinted a particularly bright, warm green in a stray shaft of watery spring sunlight. With a slight nod of acquiescence, he murmured gently, “Of course.”

Just like that her irritation fled, her chest felt lighter, and she smiled back at him, a small, twisted, apologetic smile, but a real one. When she slipped her hand into his, his grip was warm and firm. Their shoulders brushed now and again as they finished their walk, in a silence more comfortable than when they began.

*****

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

Nikita leaned down to the open window. “No Michael. I’m fine. Come pick me up when your meeting is over.”

She stood up and waved, then turned for the front door of their building. She heard Michael pull away from the curb, but she didn’t stop to take a deep breath or square her shoulders or in any way indicate that she had the slightest hesitation about walking into the apartment. She knew full well he was watching her.

She got all the way into the elevator before she let herself sag against the wall, raising her hands to watch her trembling fingers, willing her muscles to still and relax.

Once she got inside, it didn’t seem that bad. They’d had a cleaning service in after they left for Belgium, so the apartment had the vaguely foreign air of anonymous tidiness. She retrieved everything the girls wanted, raided her and Michael’s closets for the clothes they needed for the reception that night, and had it all packed up and by the door in record time. But she was too efficient. She finished well before Michael would be back to get her. 

She told herself to call a taxi, to call him to let him know he didn’t need to come for her, and get out, but she was already walking to Margaret’s room. 

*****

“Nikita! Nikita?” Michael’s voice echoed loudly through the apartment, and it took Nikita a moment or two to figure out it was really him and not part of her uneasy, groggy dream, running through the murk, trying and failing to find and save her scattered children from faceless, nameless threats.

He found her before she could answer, appearing in the doorway to Margaret’s room, concern, relief and irritation chasing each other across his face. “Nikita?”

She struggled to sit up. “Hi.” Her voice was raspy and dry and she started coughing.

Her head was killing her, the result of crying herself into an exhausted sleep.

Michael crouched in front of her, lifting her chin so he could examine her eyes. After a long minute, he stood up. “Where’s your bag? You need your pills.”

“If I wanted a personal drug pusher, I’d hire one.” Her voice was too loud, too harsh.

He snapped back, “If I wanted to be one, I’d hire out.”

Nikita dropped her eyes first, and caught sight of Margaret’s Real Madrid sweatshirt crumpled on the bed next to her. She had pulled it out because she hoped it would still smell faintly of their last day of travel. She had pressed her face into the soft, faded fabric and inhaled the traces of her lost child, and she had started to cry. Now she pulled it into her lap and folded it neatly, brushing away the fresh tear drops as they fell. Once she stood up, she placed it gently back into the bottom drawer of Margaret’s dresser, running her hand along the neat stacks of jeans and tee-shirts. Margaret never kept her drawers neatly. Her clothes were tidy because Margaret had never come home after their last trip. 

Michael cleared his throat, so she closed the drawer and left the room, shutting the door softly behind her, wiping surreptitiously at her cheeks before she followed him out and down to her car.

The reception for the new high commissioner was a brilliant and glittery affair, and if they didn’t look their absolute best, they looked damned good. An exacting teacher had trained them in a harsh school. She and Michael both accomplished what they needed to: seeing those who needed to be seen, speaking with those who needed to hear, listening to those who needed to talk, and being seen by those who needed to see.

The cold night air, after the hot, crowded party, made her shiver as they stood waiting for the bellman to summon the next cab. Michael wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close, and after the briefest of hesitations, she relaxed into his embrace, reminding herself to take the warmth and comfort he could offer, even if it wasn’t exactly what she wanted or needed from him. Not that she knew exactly what that was, either.

He fell asleep almost immediately after they had sex, wrapped around her, practically pinning her to the bed with his arm heavy around her waist and his leg wound through hers. Her meds kicked in and she fell asleep before she’d finished working out, in her head, exactly how she would tell him how much she hated it when he did that.

They had breakfast with Adam before they left town, and learned he was planning to head back to Africa soon. Adam didn’t work for MSF, he worked with a group that assisted in distributing, installing and adapting technologies for third world nations, mostly in Africa, but also in central and east Asia. 

When Nikita asked him if he was ready to go back into the field, he assured her that if he stayed in Paris any longer he was going to go batty from having nothing to do. Which wasn’t really an answer, but was the best she was going to get, obviously. He and Michael spoke only of the latest political news, though they hugged each other tightly before she and Michael left. Another instance where it was obviously insufficient, and yet the most she was going to get as far as seeing father and son work out whatever their issues were.

*****

Nikita scowled at her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she tossed back the sleeping pills. Every time she thought she was done with them, that she was sleeping well enough to get by on her own, something new would happen to disrupt her hard won balance.

Today it was getting called into the director’s office at the girls’ school to discuss, of all people, Isabella. Isabella had always been a classic oldest daughter, quiet, compliant, willing, and conflict avoidant with anyone but her siblings. Today, quiet, compliant, conflict avoidant Isabella had kicked, all too literally, the bloody snot out of another girl in her class. No one at the school had really tried to defend the other girl, who had been taunting a group of new students, refugees from the latest crisis in the Congo, and Isabella had been defending them. Apparently it had started with words and then escalated, but everyone was quite sure that Isabella’s final assault was out of all proportion to the event in question.

To keep Isabella from being suspended, or worse, thrown out of the school once the other parent showed up full of angry bluster, Nikita had given the director a very short version of Margaret’s abduction and death, limiting all her daughters’ roles to those of horrified observers. 

When Isabella discovered that, as she put it, ‘their cover had been blown,’ and that Nikita had ‘betrayed them’ she actually started yelling at Nikita in the hallway at the school, something she had never once done in her entire life in public and extremely rarely in private. Then she rode home in stony silence: a silence unbroken, at least towards Nikita, in all the hours since. 

Michael’s only contribution had been to offer to help Isabella plan a better, untraceable assault, the next time she wanted to take someone out for behaving badly. This made her stamp out of the room, hissing loudly about her violently twisted family.

Kate, Sophie and Gabrielle then spent the evening offering Nikita unsolicited hugs and kisses, which she could only assume was their reaction to what must have been the stricken expression on her own face at Isabella’s behavior.

When she walked back into their bedroom after swallowing the pills, Michael was working at the small table he had set up by the window and turned into a desk. She pretended not to know he was still tracking Section activities as he attended to MSF business, he pretended not to be doing it. Another reason she was back on sleeping meds. He looked up and said, “She will get over it.”

“Which ‘it’?”

“Killing Jerome.”

“She won’t talk about that, not with me, not with the counselors, not with anyone. Neither of them will.”

“Give it time.”

“Time.” She sighed and collapsed onto their bed. “I’d hoped there had been enough time that I could dismiss of all the therapists.”

“I think you should. They’ve done all they can.”

She closed her lips on ‘how the hell would you know? You never met with one!’ and said instead, “Yeah. I will. Right after Isabella meets with them, one last time.”

The following week, nine weeks after they arrived in Belgium, Nikita dismissed all the counselors, much to almost everyone’s relief. Only Sophie seemed to want to continue the sessions, so as a way to get her out of the house, Nikita started taking her to a clinic in town once a week. 

Isabella apologized to the other student, to her classmates, the teachers, the director, her volleyball coaches, anyone who had even been tangentially related to the scene that day, and the breach in decorum seemed to heal over quickly. She even tried to apologize to Michael and Nikita, but they assured her that she didn’t owe them anything for doing what she thought was right. The director apparently kept the information about Margaret closely held, to the girls’ relief, for no one ever spoke to them of it.

By the time the trees were fully leafed out and her favorite April flowers had come and gone, Nikita decided they could all do without her for a time, booked a ticket on the ferry, and headed for London. 

*****

Quinn closed her phone and said, “I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to change our plans for this weekend.”

Zoe paused with her fork half way to her mouth, her eyes wide in surprise. “What? Why?”

“Nikita’s coming.”

“With a two-day warning?”

Quinn shrugged. She’d actually had more warning than that, Nikita just hadn’t confirmed until now that she would really be able to get away. However Quinn had seen no reason to say anything to Zoe until Nikita’s plans were finalized. “Yes.”

“And our plans just go ffft?”

Quinn raised her brows. “Our plans were to go running with the dogs and maybe go see a movie. Hardly earth shaking.” 

Zoe frowned. “That’s not the point.”

Quinn sat back and folded her hands over her crossed knee. “So what is the point?”

“That you just drop everything for her.”

“She’s one of my oldest, dearest friends, and she just recently experienced major trauma. She needs a weekend escape. Don’t make this a big deal.”

“She’s more than a ‘friend’. It is a big deal. To me.”

Quinn shook her head. “Zoe. Don’t do this.”

“You fuck him, sometimes, too, don’t you.”

“I won’t bother to lie, so don’t ask me if you don’t want to know.”

“I want to know. I need to know.”

“Very rarely, and not in a long time.” Quinn was well aware that for this answer to be true, ‘fuck’ had to be very narrowly and quite literally defined, but she was not going to explain or defend her own choices, not even to her current girlfriend. She also, she smugly reminded herself, did not go around sharing the details of her sex life, not without the consent of everyone involved, and never while in a crowded bistro at lunchtime. 

She was guiltily aware that more often than not Nikita and Michael both disapproved of just how much information she chose to withhold from her other lovers, and that awareness threatened to take the sheen out of her self-righteous glow, so she firmly squashed it.

“Why?” 

Zoe’s tone was a bit too anguished for Quinn’s taste, so she decided to try a new approach. She winked as she grinned salaciously. “Heat of the moment.”

“That’s it?”

“Well. Yes! He’s a very sexy man.” Quinn laughed. “What more does there need to be?”

“So, why not more often then?” Zoe eyed her suspiciously. “You like sexy men.”

Quinn remembered Mick’s confusion and smiled. “He’s not my type. Even when I do choose men for myself, Michael’s way too top dog for me.”

Zoe stabbed viciously at her salad. “So it’s her. Always her. Nikita.”

“You make it sound like some sort of fatal attraction. We take vacations together a couple of times a year, usually in some place distant and warm. We lie in the sun, drink caipirinas, tell each other bad jokes, and fuck. That’s it.” 

Well, again, not exactly. That made it sound like it was always just the two of them. Which was often true, but not always. Sometimes Michael, or the kids, or all of them, were on the same vacation. Frequently the ‘distant and warm’ place was their current house, which happened to be in such a spot. And once again, Zoe was not enough a part of her life to be briefed on those details, on that past and that present. Not yet, anyway.

“And you won’t stop.”

Quinn narrowed her eyes. “Why should I?”

“Because I asked?”

“This is not a place you should go.”

“Yes. It is.”

“I was very clear with you about Nikita, from the beginning.”

“That was then, this is now.”

“Now is when Nikita needs a safe place to get away, and I’m offering her one. Deal with it.”

*****

Two days later, Quinn opened the door to Nikita and had to swallow the first words that popped into her head, which were, “Oh my god, you look terrible.” Instead she said, “Hey you,” and offered her a glass of wine.

Nikita looked exhausted. She was thinner, and very pale, so pale that her eyes looked almost bruised above the dark, bluish-purple shadows underneath. She had let her hair go without color for so long that her darker blond roots stood out dramatically against the brighter color she usually preferred. More shocking to Quinn than her roots, though, was how much grey she could see in them, threading through the darker strands. 

Quinn had almost no maternal instincts, so her immediate desire to push chicken soup, white bread and a good long sleep were surprising to say the least, especially as she had neither chicken soup nor white bread on hand. 

Nikita was also distracted, though she was trying hard to keep to their normal script of raunchy banter and acid political commentary. Finally, halfway through supper, Quinn took a deep breath and asked, “How is everybody?”

Nikita smiled gratefully at her. “Kind of a mess, actually. I mean, on the surface things seem better. Michael’s up and around and back at work. Adam is back in Africa. Izzy, Kate and Gabrielle are in school in town and seem pretty happy there, but…”

“But.” Quinn counted quickly in her head. “Sophie?”

“Sophie will barely leave the cabin. She refused to go to school in town. She’s started sleeping on the day bed right outside our room. She hides out when the other girls bring new friends home. She still cries in her sleep. She’s watching football with Michael.”

“Sophie’s watching football?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow.”

“Right.”

“What else?”

“Iz has mostly stopped talking. I mean, she hides it well enough that no one will bother her about it, but she’s really withdrawn. Even from Kate. Who is retaliating by running with a tight group of girls from school and flirting like mad with all the boys she sees, isolating Iz even more. Michael is still easily distracted. He called me one day last week from the road because he couldn’t remember where he was supposed to be going. He was supposed to pick the girls up from school, but had got headed for Munich somehow. Gabrielle wants to spend all her time at her new friends’ houses, rather than come home, and there is something ugly between Michael and Adam.”

Quinn refilled Nikita’s wine glass. “What’s between Adam and Michael?”

“I think they both think that if Michael had let Adam fall, he might have been able to save Margaret.”

“There is no way to know that.”

“Which everyone knows, even them. Which doesn’t stop either one of them from wondering about the choice Michael made.”

“That’s crazy.” Quinn wished she sounded more emphatic. It was crazy. It was also all too believable. She refilled her own wine glass. “And you? How are you?”

Nikita wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Mostly fine.”

Quinn cleared her throat meaningfully.

“Okay.” Nikita raised her eyes to Quinn’s. “I do most of my serious crying in the shower, so no one will see me and get upset. I’ve lost my appetite and I have trouble sleeping. If I don’t take anything, I wake up a lot, adrenalin pumping, trying to run, trying to reach my arms out, just that little bit further. Then I can’t relax enough to go back to sleep.”

It took Quinn much less than a second to decide which part of that to respond too. She knew how much Nikita hated that that particular bit of video had circulated throughout the Section for years afterward. So she asked anyway, smiling lewdly as she did. “Michael can’t help with that?”

“Ha Ha.”

“Really.”

“It’s... Complicated.”

“Spit it out.”

“Yes, we’re fucking again. Almost as much as before. But, it’s all, very,” Nikita twisted her lips, then grimaced, “efficient. No wasted motion. No extra time.”

Quinn looked at the way Nikita was staring at her empty wine glass, idly spinning the stem between her fingers, and said, “what else.”

“He’s not talking to me.”

Fifteen years ago, this complaint would have made Quinn laugh meanly. Of course the great stone-faced one wasn’t talking to her. But she’d learned many things in the years since then, including some things about Michael Samuelle. Michael wasn’t the type to strike up idle conversations with strangers, or with people in whom he had no interest, but he was perfectly capable of being a charming conversationalist when it suited him. In the company of the few people about whom he really cared, he was positively chatty. For him to be not talking to Nikita now was a big change, and not a happy one. Maybe it was not a surprising one, but it was not a good one either.

Quinn sighed, and said, “So, what are you going to do about it?”

Nikita reached for the wine bottle. Refilling her glass she smiled lazily at Quinn and said, “This weekend? Not a damn thing.”

Nikita never did answer the question, and so when Quinn dropped her off at the train station on Tuesday morning she had no idea what, if anything, her plan was. If she even had a plan. On the bright side, Nikita had slept soundly while she was with Quinn, so that was four nights and most of Monday of catching up. On Saturday, Quinn booked them into her favorite day spa, and then they went shopping. They also ate as much rich food as Quinn could find an opportunity to push. More rested, with her hair it’s normal color again and wearing a more fashion forward outfit, Nikita looked a lot more like her old self when she left than when she came. On the other hand, she was drinking too much, easily putting away a couple of bottles of wine by herself each day she was there. A search of her bags had revealed recent migraine prescriptions, sleeping pills and anti-depressants. The pill count suggested she wasn’t taking all of them every day, but still, closer to every day than not. 

Quinn wasn’t anyone’s savior, and she wasn’t going to start now, not even for Nikita. Especially not for Nikita. Saving Nikita was Michael’s job, and she had no desire to challenge him for it. Or, at least, not until circumstances were far more dire than this. But, she was more worried than she wanted to be. Frowning, she told herself to push it aside. Time would determine what, if anything, she should or could do. 

Flipping open her phone, she hit speed dial. When her call was picked up she said, “Hey Zoe! Can I make you dinner tonight?” 

*****

Nikita caught sight of Michael standing outside the station as her train was pulling in, and her heart began to beat just a little faster. He looked really good. He’d finally visited a barber and the beard he’d grown since February was neatly trimmed, and his hair, though greyer than before and much longer than he’d worn it for years, was also freshly cut. He looked fit and alert, and she thought leaving him in charge by himself had been a very good idea and something she should definitely return to from here on out.

When she met him, accompanied by Sophie and Gabrielle, outside the barricade, he was smiling broadly in warm welcome. “Hi,” he said, pulling her into a firm embrace, “you look really good.”

She hugged him back, hard. “You too.”

He really looked at her then, meeting her eyes for a long beat and then dropping his gaze to her lips, tilting his head just enough to kiss her. His lips were warm and soft and their kiss got very interesting, very quickly, but Sophie and Gabrielle were dancing around them, singsonging, “Mom! Mom! Mommy! We have a surprise for you!”

Michael turned to look at them, leaving his arms wrapped securely around Nikita. He shook his head at them as he laughed. “You weren’t supposed to say anything until we got closer to home!”

The girls didn’t answer, just chortled delightedly and swooped in to hug Nikita, then taking her hands, dragged her toward the car.

All the way back to the cabin the girls giggled and whispered in the back seat, obviously eager for Nikita to ask them questions, but she held her tongue, enjoying their excitement. It was the first time she’d seen Sophie’s eyes sparkle like that since Margaret’s death. Instead she told Michael about her visit with Quinn, and her two days of meetings in Paris on the way back. He told her about what they had done on their days without her, and passed along the latest MSF news and gossip.

When they got to the cabin, they piled out of the car and the girls rushed to the door and then stopped, looking back impatiently as Nikita and Michael caught up with them. At the door, Gabrielle said, “cover her eyes!”

Michael moved in behind her and wrapped one arm around her waist, pulling her close against his chest to guide her, and covered her eyes with his other hand. She felt the heat from his body seeping into hers from knee to neck, the solid planes of his chest and thighs pressing close against her and her pulse accelerated and her palms heated at the contact. She could definitely hear the girls’ barely stifled laughter as they opened the door and clattered inside, and then she heard other noises that were incredibly familiar but that she couldn’t quite place.

He guided her through the door and turned right, toward the kitchen, then stopped almost immediately and pointed her toward the wall under the stairs, and removed his hand. She had barely registered the wire kennel in front of her, or the two wiggly brown bodies inside it, before the girls were yodeling, “Puppies! We got two new puppies!”

It was, indeed, puppies. Two squirming, adorable puppies, complete with wavy hair falling over their shiny eyes, lolling tongues and frantic puppy energy.

Nikita looked at Michael, laughing in surprise, even as she dropped to her knees to get a closer look. “Puppies?”

“We passed a house with a sign that said, ‘free puppies,’ and Sophie wanted to go see them. These were the last two, and we left with them.”

She reached out to open the kennel. “Why were they free?”

“The mother is a registered Belgian sheep dog. They didn’t know who the father was. They think, possibly, the spaniel mix from the next farm over.”

Sophie cried, “watch out, they’re escape artists!” just as the first puppy attempted to make a break for freedom. Nikita caught its collar and Gabrielle got hold of the other one. Holding the one she caught up in the air so she could look into its adorable little face, Nikita asked, “What are their names?”

“Duke and Duchess.” Sophie said.

Nikita smiled at Sophie’s triumphant expression. “Good names,” she said. “Margaret would approve.”

Margaret surely would have. Their dog during Margaret’s youngest years had been a Rottweiler-Black Lab mix named Prince. His name was quite random; his previous owner had given it to him. Nonetheless, when it came time to name their next not-so-tiny puppy three years ago, Margaret had vehemently insisted that they choose in the same vein, so Baron it was. Duke and Duchess carried on the pattern, and that was something Margaret treasured.

The noise had obviously attracted their attention, and Isabella came in from the kitchen and Katherine came up the stairs from below, both of them smiling at the puppies too. Nikita looked up at Isabella. “What do you think?”

Izzy grinned at her. “I think they’re adorable.”

She looked around at all of them. “You all think we’re ready for this? Two puppies?”

A chorus of ‘yeses’ followed and so Nikita shrugged, and laughed again. “Okay. Well. Then. Duke and Duchess.” She said to the puppy in her hands, “Welcome to the family.”

******

Michael looked up from the papers spread across his lap. “Are Gabrielle and Sophie settled?”

“Yes.” She pushed the door closed, then added, “for now.” 

He was sitting against the headboard of their bed, his hair still damp from a shower and wearing only loose drawstring pants and a pair of reading glasses, his legs stretched out, bare feet crossed at the ankles. In the low light of the lamp she could still make out the yellowing shadows of two-week old sparing bruises on his torso. She drifted to the foot of their bed. “Do you have a lot of work to do?”

He met her eyes, shaking his head and smiling. “No.” He began to gather up the scattered files. “Just waiting for you.”

Nikita grinned back and toed off her shoes, pushing them under the edge of the bed. “Miss me?”

He leaned over to set his stack of work on the floor, giving her a good view of the muscles rippling in his back, along with another faded bruise. He removed his glasses as he sat back up, setting them on the bedside table. “Always.”

She quickly stripped off her trousers and shirt, tossing them more or less towards the chair behind her. Down to her underwear, a new set from a shopping side trip on the way through Paris, she sank onto her knees on the mattress and crawled up Michael’s legs to straddle his thighs. 

He wrapped his hands around her hips, hooking his fingertips inside the edge of her panties. He drew the backs of his fingers over her hipbones and across her belly under the edge of black lace, making her belly contract from the tickling sensation even as she scooted closer to him. He dragged his fingers up her torso to cup her breasts, his thumbs brushing firmly across her nipples, which promptly stiffened at the contact. Tilting his chin up to meet her gaze, he said, “You had a good trip.”

“Yes.” She settled into his lap and framed his face with her hands, his beard tickling her palms. Then she ducked her head, her lips hovering over his as she dropped her voice to mummer, “and I’m glad to be home.”

*****

“Okay, I’ll send Annalisa the amended file tomorrow. Let me know what you think.” Nikita ended her call as she walked into the kitchen, and then stopped in surprise. Kate was sitting at the table, hunched over a scattered pile of half a dozen or so gun parts, a field stripped Styer AUG assault rifle if Nikita had had to guess. “What’s all this?”

Kate looked up. “House rule. I put the gun back together, dad teaches me how to shoot it.”

“Oh, right.” Nikita smiled. “Walter’s rule, actually.”

“Yes. I know.” Kate sighed deeply and rolled her eyes. “I’ve heard it all before, mom. Remember? I’m the third one.”

Nikita ignored the attitude and asked, “How’s it going?”

“I’m stuck.” Kate looked up with her most winsome smile and batted her eyelashes beguilingly. “Can you give me a hint?”

“No.” Nikita grinned back at her. “That would be cheating. Besides, you’re really good with puzzles.”

Kate exchanged her smile for a sarcastic lip curl. “So, where’s my box top picture?”

Nikita laughed and shook her head.

Isabella walked in and laid a fully assembled M16 on the table, then headed to the sink to wash her hands.

Kate frowned. “Show off.”

Isabella smirked. “You have twenty minutes before we head out.”

Nikita was close enough to hear Kate mutter, very quietly, under her breath, “bitch.”

She put her hand on the table and leaned close, so only Kate could hear. “I heard that. That wasn’t very nice.”

Kate muttered, “Sorry.” Only, it was quite clear she wasn’t.

Nikita went on, still speaking for Kate’s ears alone. “It isn’t Izzy’s fault you haven’t started yet.”

Kate scowled and reached for the first two pieces.

Nikita pulled out a chair and sat down. She looked up at Isabella, who was drying her hands and watching them curiously. “Would you give us some space, please?”

Iz shrugged. “Sure,” she said, and left the room, but not without pausing to pick up her gun and smirk meaningfully at Kate on the way by. Nikita suppressed a groan.

Once Iz was gone, Nikita said, “What’s going on?”

Kate reached for another part. “What?”

“With you and Iz. Why are you sniping at each other?”

“Nothing’s going on.” Kate locked the barrel in place.

Nikita reached out and put her hand on the rifle, holding it still until Kate raised her eyes. “You can’t go shooting with your sister if you’re angry with her.”

“Mom!”

Nikita kept her hand on the gun, and waited.

After a short staring contest, which Nikita won, Kate ground out, “Fine. Yes. I’m pissed at her. She kicks the crap out of another kid at school, and instead of getting into major trouble…. Nothing. And now she’s like, Isabella, the weird violent girl!”

“Hmm.”

“If they knew you were teaching her how to fight, and dad was teaching her how to shoot assault rifles and sniper guns, everybody would run away from her!”

“I’m teaching you to fight, and dad is teaching you to shoot…?” Nikita didn’t add, ‘and you both killed a man,’ hoping Kate might bring it up on her own.

Kate opened her mouth to reply, then paused, obviously struggling to think through her emotions. Just when Nikita thought Kate was about to speak, there was a sharp rapping on the glass of the French doors behind them, and they looked up to see Michael, gun bag slung over his shoulder. They read his lips more than heard his muffled, “Let’s go.”

Nikita looked back at Kate. “What are you really pissed about?”

For a fleeting instant, Nikita thought Kate might actually tell her, but then adolescent self-protection shields dropped down over her eyes and her face closed off. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

While Nikita struggled to find something to say that might reopen the tiny crack, Kate said, “Mom. Please let go of my gun. I’ll be fine, but if I don’t get outside in the next few minutes dad will make me do pushups or run laps or something equally hideous for being late.”

Nikita let go of the gun and stood up, contemplating her daughter’s bent head. Michael wouldn’t, of course, do anything like that if Kate were late to the range. He would use the power of his most condescending, most dismissive stare and a cutting remark about dedication and motivation to make his humiliated student wish he would assign something as stupid as pushups or laps. “Okay. For now.” 

Kate looked up, faint alarm in her eyes. 

Nikita shrugged a shoulder and smiled as reassuringly as she could. “Whatever it is, it won’t stop bugging you until you deal with it.”

Kate’s stare got a little harder, then she dropped her gaze, pushed the last piece into place, tightened the bolts and stood up, reassembled rifle in her hands. “I’ll be fine.”

Recognizing a wall of denial when she saw one, Nikita merely nodded in acknowledgement and stepped aside so Kate could leave the room.

*****

“I can’t believe it! You actually did a background check on Robert?”

Nikita shrugged. “Yes. We did. He’s someone you’ve been spending time with.”

Isabella looked like she didn’t know whether to explode or stomp out. “How did you even find out?” 

“How do you think?” Michael asked.

Isabella narrowed her eyes and snarled, in a tone full of promised retribution, “Kate.”

“No,” Nikita answered, “my own eyes, thanks.” Though, it was true, Kate had been dropping anvil-sized hints, hints Nikita had chosen to ignore in favor of her own observation.

“Is this because his family is from the Congo?”

“No.” Michael answered. “It’s because he’s interested in you.”

After another long stare of disbelief, Isabella’s expression hardened. “Are you going to do this to anyone who has any interest in me?”

“Yes.”

“Because I’m your daughter?”

“Yes, but the emphasis should be on ‘ours’ and not ‘daughter.’” Nikita said.

“Yeah, sure, like you did this to Adam?”

“Until he was twenty,” Nikita said, flicking her glance toward Michael, who kept his face blank.

Iz narrowed her eyes, then she abruptly pulled out her phone and hit a pre-programmed number. She just stared at them, daring them to ask her whom she was calling. 

Nikita exchanged another quick glance with Michael, then sat back in resignation.

After a long minute or two while the phone rang, Isabella’s expression changed as whomever she called answered. “Hi, Adam, it’s Iz.”

“Yes, everything’s fine. I mean, no, it’s not, but no mayhem or death or anything.” She shot Michael and Nikita another condemning glare with that comment. “I have a question. Did mom and dad really do a background check on anybody you went out with until you were twenty?”

“Yeah.” Iz listened for a moment, frowning, then looked up. “Adam says to look dad in the eyes,” which she did, dramatically, “and ask to see the file on Marco.”

Michael looked at Nikita, then with a shrug and a wry twist of his lips, reached for his tablet and called up a file, then handed it to Iz.

After examining it in silence for a minute or two, Iz said, half to Adam on the phone, half to Nikita and Michael, “No. They didn’t stop when you were twenty.”

Iz rolled her eyes and sagged. “Jesus.” Then her expression grew serious again, “How do you know that?” She listed intently for a while, then said, “yeah. Okay. I get it. I’ll call you later.” She ended her call, folded her arms across her chest and looked at her parents again. “Adam says hi.”

Nikita bowed her head in acknowledgment.

Iz said, her glance flicking toward the tablet she had returned to Michael, “Do you have that much on Robert and his family?”

“Yes.”

“And does he ‘check out’?”

“Yes.”

Iz looked at them for a long beat, then nodded slightly. “So. That’s how it will be.”

Michael said, “Yes. That is how it is.”

*****

Michael dragged his hands down her back, making her hum in pleasure. They had sparred today, while the girls were at school and Sophie was playing with the puppies, and Nikita was happy to have him work the knots out of her muscles. Nudging her over on to her back, he pushed her legs apart with his knees, settling between them and running his hands up the long muscles of her thighs, digging deep into her quadriceps with his thumbs and palms, making her back arch in response to the conflicting signals flashing toward her spine – relax into the massage/tense up in anticipation – as his hands slid ever closer to her cunt. In the candlelight his eyes were darkly shadowed but she could clearly see his cock, so erect it was almost brushing against his belly as he prowled over her. She started to reach for him, but he batted her hands away. 

“No. I will tie your hands down if you can’t control them.”

Nikita dropped her arms above her head and made a noise that was supposed to be part objection, part frustration, and part laughter, that turned into strangled moan when Michael pulled her labia open with his thumbs. He scooted backwards as he bent down to drag his tongue up along her skin until he circled her clit, making her gasp and dig her heels into the mattress, pressing herself against him. He kept licking her until she was rocking her hips against his hands, the first tremors of her future orgasm sparking deep in her groin. After another minute she was thrusting and twisting, trying to push faster against his tongue, wanting more pressure, and she had agreed not to use her hands, on him or herself. 

He lifted his head and began dusting kisses across her belly and up between her breasts, and then sat up on his heels, lifted her hips and pulled her close, thrusting hard into her, making her gasp, “Oh, fuck!”

He leaned over her and laughed breathily into her ear. “Yes.”

“My hands. I want to use my hands.”

He kissed her, wet and long, then said, “no.” To make sure she wouldn’t, he caught her hands with his own and pushed them deep into the pillows above her head, using his weight to hold her still and angling his own thrusts to grind hard against her. She squeezed her thighs tight against his hips, rocking hard into him even as she tightened her pelvic muscles, clinging to his cock as pulled out, trying to hold him in, releasing when he surged back, smiling into his kiss at his faint sounds of pleasure, gasping quietly herself as her orgasm circled closer. 

Then he pulled out completely, sliding back and down her body just enough that he could pull her left nipple into his mouth, tugging gently with his teeth and making her squirm and moan. That’s when she knew it was going to be one of those nights, the ones that left her limp and completely wrung out from erotic exhaustion.

When it was over, and she lay boneless and hovering on the edge of sleep in his arms, he said, “I have to go to Kyrgyzstan. The missions there are having some troubles.” 

It took her a long breath to process his words, but once she had, she pulled away and half sat up. Leaning on her elbows, she reached for the candle, which she raised high so she could get a better look at him in the dim light. He held his expression still and bland and sincere under her scrutiny, but she had long ago learned to spot the difference between apprehensive and smug. Looking him straight in the eye, she said, “you fucker.”

He smiled sweetly, and smugly, at her, then pinched out the candle, caught her head in his hands, pulled her down and kissed her.

He left two days later, planning to be gone for ten days.

*****

As Nikita pulled the SUV into the garage that night, Kate let out a huge groan. “Oh god. I just realized! With Dad gone, supper won’t be waiting for us. I’m starving!” she wailed.

Nikita looked over to the passenger seat, where Kate was sagging dramatically against the cushions. Tuesday was always a late day for all of them. Kate and Isabella had two-hour sports practices after school and Gabrielle and Sophie had violin and then karate lessons. Snacks in the car helped stave off total breakdown, but Nikita had learned during Adam’s adolescence that energy bars and sandwiches did little to actually sate a teenager’s hunger. 

She caught Sophie’s eye and grinned. “Ready to show off?”

Sophie laughed delightedly and leapt out of the SUV, heading for the big freezer that stood next to the gun locker. She flung it open and turned to beam triumphantly at her sisters, raising her arms like a spokes model and crying “Ta da!”

The freezer was full of food containers, and as they gathered around, they could see each one had a printed label that included heating instructions and the date they were supposed to eat it and what they were supposed to eat it with.

Nikita slung her arm across Kate’s shoulders. “Never underestimate your father’s ability to micro-manage all his responsibilities, even from a distance.”

“Hey!” cried Sophie. “It was my project!”

Nikita let go of Kate and turned to stroke Sophie’s hair, chuckling as she said, “Absolutely. You did all the planning this time.” 

It was true. Michael had turned the previous week of Sophie’s homeschooling in to meal preparation for the entire period he intended to be away. He had even convinced Sophie to keep the project a secret until after he had broken the news to Nikita. Sophie had entered enthusiastically into the scheme, finding the whole process, planning, shopping, cooking and secret keeping, absorbing and engaging. 

Kate was looking speculatively at the freezer contents. “What happens if we eat things on the wrong date?” 

Sophie was aghast. “We can’t! Everything is planned out, even the leftovers!”

“Oh. My. God. You can’t be serious?”

Isabella made an exasperated sound and rolled her eyes. “Of course she’s serious. That’s how dad cooks every week. How have you not noticed?”

“What?” Kate looked shocked and Nikita frowned. 

It had never dawned on her that Kate would be that oblivious to their home economy. Michael did do most of their cooking these days, and he did plan for leftovers that could be quickly recombined for new meals. He preferred it to the daily grind of driving back and forth to town. As with everything he did, he gave the task his full attention. And, after all their years in the humanitarian relief field, he always, always operated as if all resources were scarce and needed to be stretched to their limit. A lesson she had thought they were self-consciously teaching to all their kids. Somehow, they’d clearly missed one.

Kate was still looking at her smirking sisters in bewilderment. “Oh come on!” she exclaimed, flinging out her arms in exasperation. “Let’s live a little! Be wild! Eat our meals out of order!”

“No!” Sophie cried, as she turned to Nikita, her green eyes glowing and her pointed little chin thrust out in determination. “Mom! I planned it all out! Ten days, breakfast, lunch and supper!”

At the same time, Gabrielle asked, “If dad’s not home, do I still have to eat all the vegetables on my plate?”

Nikita smiled at Sophie’s fierce expression. “Yes. It’s your project and,” she turned her head and narrowed her eyes at Kate, “we will follow your rules. In fact,” and she smiled a slightly more wicked smile as a new idea formed, “I think it would be a good idea for Kate to be your assistant. That way she won’t have to help with the clean up, which we all know she hates, and you can explain everything to her as you work.” Then she looked down at Gabrielle’s solemn, thoughtful stare, saw a fight she didn’t wish to have, at least not tonight, and, waffled. “We’ll see.”

They trailed Sophie, bustling ahead with tonight’s designated meal, into the house, Kate whingeing in protest the whole way while Isabella and Gabrielle laughed at her.

*****

On Friday evening Sophie was so engrossed in a movie that she and Gabrielle were watching that Nikita sighed and said she’d take the puppies out, when Isabella offered to come with her. Nikita barely contained her squeal of glee. Isabella had skillfully avoided almost every opportunity to be alone with her for weeks now, and she didn’t want to scare her away.

She intended to let Isabella lead the conversation, but after walking in silence for five long minutes, she gave up. “So. What’s going on with you these days?”

“I was in the director’s office today.”

Nikita nearly stumbled on the ruts in the driveway. “What? Why?”

“Somebody tore up one of the projects posted in the atrium, they’re trying to figure out who did it.”

Nikita was aghast. “Do they think you did?!”

“No! No. She doesn’t. They were just ‘investigating’ and wanted to know if I could add anything. She said ‘sneaking around’ didn’t seem to be my style.” Iz twisted her lips into ironic smirk. “Obviously, she hasn’t met dad.”

Nikita snorted her laughter.

“Did you know I could have been arrested, for assault?”

She sobered immediately. “Yes.”

“Telling them about Margaret kept me from being thrown out of school, didn’t it.”

“Yes.”

They walked on in silence, pausing only to untangle the puppies’ leashes. They had almost reached the road and were about to turn around and head back up the drive when Isabella offered, “I’m not really seeing so much of Robert these days.

“I’d noticed.” Nikita had, and she’d wondered a bit, but had chalked it up to the fleeting nature of high school romance and let it go.

“Yeah. We had, not a fight, exactly, but –“

After waiting a beat or two, Nikita murmured encouragingly, “Go on.”

Isabella grimaced, but picked up the story. “We were talking about refugee politics in government class, and he told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, that there was no way a privileged French girl like me could know anything about it, about what it was like to see people die, about living close to violence…” She trailed off again, shaking her head in frustration.

Nikita made another encouraging noise.

Iz burst out, “Robert’s a freaking banker’s son, from Kinshasa. They used to take vacations to fucking Switzerland to ski.” 

She scowled then, and suddenly looked close to tears, waving her hand defensively against phantom interlocutors. “I know! I know that his dad is in jail, and probably won’t come out alive. I know it was terrifying to have soldiers storm their house. I can hardly even imagine would it be like to know your mom was letting herself get gang-raped in the next room, to save your life and your sisters’.” She scowled again. “Not that Robert even knows I know that.” She shot Nikita a sour, tired look. “Thanks, mom and dad.” 

After a long pause, she suddenly offered Nikita a wry smile. “Of course, I can’t imagine it in part, because my mom can, like, kill people with ballpoint pens.”

“That’s a movie sweetie. I’ve never done that in my life. I prefer a gun. Or a knife. It’s your dad who likes breaking necks.”

Iz groaned. “Thank you, queen of TMI.” She looked over at Nikita. “I could only wish you were joking. Which you’re not. Are you?” Her voice rose hopefully at the end.

“I’m not joking. I have my reasons for not hiding who we are, or what we’ve done.”

Iz looked at the frolicking puppies and sighed. “Yeah.” 

“You didn’t lie to Robert.”

“No. But I never told him the full truth, either. I told him dad’s a security consultant and you work with the UN on public health stuff. He doesn’t know I’ve actually lived in refugee camps – not as a refugee, but still – or that I’ve seen people die in tent hospitals, or sometimes outside them. He doesn’t know that I’ve travelled through war zones, or handed out supplies after natural disasters.” She paused and rolled her eyes. “Of course, he’d probably insist I was some kind of danger tourist.”

“We all get that.”

“And he’d never believe me that the hardest thing of all happened in Paris. He doesn’t know about Margaret. Or her murder. Or that I killed a man.” 

Nikita waited a beat in hopeful silence. This was the first time she’d ever heard Isabella actually say those words out loud, and maybe once started more would come. 

After it was clear nothing more would, she dragged herself back to Izzy’s boy troubles. A boy clearly not worth her troubles. “Can you tell him now?”

“Now it would just sound like a contest, who’s seen or done more crap. I’d win. That won’t make him like me more.”

Nikita winced in sympathy. “Probably not.”

As they made their way up the long drive toward the house, Isabella slipped her arm through Nikita’s and they walked on together, their shoulders pressed together and their strides evenly matched. After a while, Isabella said, “I wanted to be normal, for once. Like Kate’s trying to be. Like Margaret wanted us all to be.”

“I’m sorry. That’s not something we can really give you.”

“I know. Now. And, it’s okay. Really. I’m glad to know so much about the world. The bad and the good.”

Nikita glanced sidelong at her daughter and her heart skipped a beat to see Isabella looking back, meeting her eyes with a tentative smile. 

*****

Michael’s voice was hard to hear over the phone, he was obviously talking as he walked, and the noise of the surrounding crowd – market? hospital queue? central plaza? – leaked through the connection as well. But, all the same, she was certain she had heard him tell her he wouldn’t be home as scheduled.

“Why? What’s happened?”

“That’s what I have to discover.”

Her heart started beating very fast. “Is something wrong with the mission?”

“No. That’s all straightened out.”

“Then-“

He cut her off. “Do you remember the data I showed you on success rates?”

“Yes.” She did, and now she knew he wasn’t talking about MSF missions any longer.

Suddenly the ambient noise died and his voice rang clearly. “Open up a secure channel.”

She raced for their bedroom and her computer. By the time she had finished tunneling in to their most secure messaging location, there was already a new message waiting for her. 

By the time she closed the links, twenty minutes later, her hands were trembling.

*****

Nikita sat back and refilled her glass, shaking off the last few drops from the now empty wine bottle. In the week since Michael’s call, they had run out of Sophie’s prepared meals. They subsisted on frozen pizza and Chinese take-out until tonight, when Kate’s unending complaining about the chemicals in processed food landed her in charge of spending her weekend preparing meals for the coming week. The downside of this was that Nikita would have to supervise, or they would still be eating boxed food and still listening to Kate complain well into next week. She was also going to have to ask Kate and Izzy to take turns skipping school to stay home with Sophie, who was getting justifiably cranky after three weeks of spending half her day in the back seat of the SUV, riding back and forth to town on errands not her own. 

For the last week, Nikita had spent her few precious hours while the girls were in school and at night after they were asleep, or, at least, in their rooms, re-running Michael’s searches and re-doing his numbers, calling in a few favors of her own to double check what she was seeing. She had only the minor pleasure of watching the new Section’s completion rate inch up a few, tiny, percentage points, after she found sign of a successful string of missions in the western Mediterranean.

She could also see that the trend lines were improving, slowly. She judged that some of the worst problems early on were more the result of ambitious over-reach than any fundamental operational incompetence. The problem was that Sections were improving too slowly and without focus, and in the meantime, had made too much noise in a world over-full of clandestine organizations. 

Which had resulted in the inevitable approach to her or Michael, seeking information. A former cold op from her days as Operations had returned home to the Urals and spent his intervening years as consigliore to his uncle. His uncle was a local big-wig, loud, blustering, corrupt as hell, squatting all over all commerce in his locale, legal, illegal and in-between. The new Section had, for an as yet unclear purpose, targeted the uncle, and, missed. The former cold op had recognized the assault for what it was, and learning that Michael was in the region with MSF business, had sought him out to ask him what the hell was going on. Which is what Michael was trying to piece together, because MSF supply routes ran right through the uncle. 

It all brought her back to the same place. 

“Damn you to hell, Jerome,” she muttered, as she set her empty glass aside and pulled her computer closer. 

She quickly closed all her work files, leaving open only her albums of Margaret. After taking a deep breath, she started scrolling slowly through them. Tonight she lingered longest on Margaret’s baby pictures, in particular a snapshot of her own mother, taken not long before she died. Roberta was sitting in a rattan chair on shaded veranda and cradling newborn Margaret, still folded up like a tiny lima bean, sleeping against her breast. A little Isabella and a smaller-still Katherine leaned over her shoulders. They were all looking up, laughing at whoever had taken the picture. 

After a while she sat up and shook herself out. She printed the photo and carried it upstairs to prop it on her bedside table. She fell asleep crying softly about all the things that should have been and could no longer be.

*****

Nikita rocked faster, her muscles coiling in anticipation as she pressed herself harder against Michael, bracing her arms against the wall above their bed for better leverage. Michael was below her, his cock so deep inside her that he jolted her cervix with every roll, sending tiny sparks of not-quite-pain across her abdomen and lower back, increasing the ache building in her cunt until she was gasping with every thrust. He tightened his hands against her hips, his fingers digging into her muscles, urging her to ride up and slow down, lengthening her stroke until her breathing eased. Swaying back on her heels to accommodate the new position put her out of reach of the wall, leaving her hands fluttering for purchase and balance. In response Michael sat up further, wrapping one arm around her waist, holding onto her thigh with his other hand, keeping her steady. As her hands settled on his shoulders he leaned in and sucked her left nipple into his mouth, biting down just hard enough to send new sparks cascading down to her belly, colliding with the tremors already fanning outward from below.

Earlier that evening, Nikita and the girls had been sitting at the kitchen table, finishing their supper and idly planning for the summer vacation ahead when they caught the sound of a car approaching. Rushing to the windows they watched as a battered, fifteen year-old Land Rover bumped over their dirt driveway. They had spilled out onto the graveled terrace as the vehicle pulled to a stop and a tired-looking Michael climbed out, holding open his arms and once again, not toppling over when hit by the human wave of their daughters. Over their shoulders, Michael met her eyes and smiled, just for her, and she grinned back, all her worries and concerns temporarily set aside in the wash of happiness at seeing him home.

She’d formed a very specific plan for dragging him up to bed as soon as she could, but he foiled it by beating her there and lying in wait. He had pulled her through the door with one hand while he shut it with the other, then he pushed her up against it and kissed her. Her hands were already busy with his clothes, anxious to see for herself that he was as unharmed as he seemed.

Her body was bright with tension; sweat filming her skin, slick between her breasts and pooling in the small of her back. She felt Michael’s orgasm coming in the way he bucked harder against her, his movements growing sharper and jerkier and she strained to squeeze her muscles tighter around him, rolling her hips to pull him deeper inside. Her own climax was not far off either and she picked up speed again as she sought greater friction. He let her nipple pop free with last twist of his tongue, then pulled her flush against him and lifted her just enough that they could roll over, ending with him on top. Their familiar rhythm quickly re-established, it wasn’t long until she exhaled on a sharp cry as her orgasm seized her, and Michael quickly followed her over. He held her so tightly that her whole body shook with his as they both shuddered in release, his forehead pressed into the crook of her neck. 

Eventually their heartbeats slowed down and Michael raised his head to kiss her again. 

After pulling on the nightgown she wore against the nearly inevitable arrival of not-nearly-so-small-as-they-had-been nighttime visitors now that Michael was home, Nikita crawled back into their bed. She nestled herself against him, draping her leg across his as he wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her closer. She drew her hand over his naked chest and down to his hips and back again, slipping her fingers under the loose waist of his pajamas to trace the join of his thigh, molding the familiar contours of chest and abs, assuring herself all over again that he was whole and safe and home once more, she tried to wrestle up the courage to start the conversation.

After a long silence, Michael said, “It won’t stop, now that it’s begun.”

“No. It won’t.” She paused to raise her head on her hand so she could see Michael’s face. He went very still, but she was pressed so close to him she felt the tension humming through him all the same. “You were right. We do it your way.”

He nodded his head incrementally and his hand tightened on her hip even as the rest of him relaxed. “Thank you.”

“You knew I’d agree. In the end.”

“I hoped.”

She grimaced at him, gently tapping his chest. “Gloating would be more attractive than sympathy.”

“No. I know this isn’t what you wanted.”

She shrugged. “It’s the best of the options we have now.” She dropped her head back to his shoulder, and began rubbing her fingertips in slow circles along the hollow of smooth, soft skin just below his hipbone. As images of a future she could no longer escape played through her mind, her fingers, drifting along almost of their own accord, traced a new path down to his groin. An exploratory stroke along his thickening cock made her wonder if they’d gotten dressed too soon after all. When he slid his hand down to her ass, pressing his thumb into a pressure point that made her groan and arch her back, pressing her cunt closer against his thigh, she knew they had. 

Swallowing a premature moan, she extended her reach to cup the still loose skin at the base of his cock and roll it gently between her fingers, pleased to feel it tighten at her touch. “Why did they target Stefan’s uncle?”

“He was in the way of someone else they wanted to do business with.”

“Botched assassination is a sad calling card.”

He grunted in agreement, shifting his hips impatiently under her stilled fingers.

“Do think we could do better?”

“That’s not the point.”

She wrapped her fingers around his erection, feeling his hips lift as she began to squeeze. “It should be. Part of the point, anyway.”

Michael regarded her quietly for a long moment, then he smiled and shifted completely out from under her, rolling to face her, so close his lips nearly brushed her cheek as he whispered breathily into her ear.

Nikita’s eyelids dropped closed as his lips met hers, another shudder of anticipation rocking through her as she pressed herself closer against him. 

*****

After an early supper on first Sunday night in August, once the sound of Adam’s car faded away down the drive, Isabella said, “Does anyone else think it’s really, really eerie just how much Alice looks like Marco, only with longer hair and boobs?”

Adam got home from Africa about the same time Michael got home from the Urals, and had been coming up to the cabin most weekends since. At first he brought a rotating group of friends, all cyclists like himself, and they spent most of each Saturday on daylong rides through the Belgian countryside. Saturday nights he and his guests filled the patio with music and laughter and dancing and Nikita only cried a little bit thinking how much Margaret would have loved it, even more than her sisters did. 

But by the middle of July Adam had started coming accompanied only by a woman who worked for the same organization he did. Her name was Alice and Nikita, along with everyone in the family, was pretty sure that she was a girlfriend, as well as a friend. Adam didn’t see fit to share any more information with them than usual and they had all long since learned the uselessness of just asking. Even Gabrielle had given up, and she had all the brazen determination of any youngest child in a large, sprawling family. Though there was a lot of giggling about it on his sisters’ parts, whenever he left the room, and wild speculation when they returned to Paris each Sunday evening.

At Iz’s question, everyone started in surprise, and then started to snicker, and then to laugh, and then to laugh so hard they fell back in their chairs, holding their bellies and wiping their eyes. Because it was true. Alice really looked like Marco, or Marco really looked like Alice, and there was no way for them all not to think this was the funniest thing that had happened to them in months.

*****

Two nights later Nikita strolled into the kitchen after the girls had all gone to their rooms, planning to close up for the night. She found Michael waiting for her, a startlingly large collection of empty wine bottles lined up on the counter next to him, along with the boxes of her various medications, prescription and off the shelf.

He was leaning up against the counter next to this unpleasant collection of things, his hands in his pockets, his expression serious, and, more immediately horrifying to Nikita, kind. 

He gestured at the counter beside him with his head. He said, “That’s from the last six days.”

“Really?” She did her best to sound interested and surprised.

“Yes.”

She shrugged. “Adam and Alice were here for the weekend.” 

“Alice doesn’t drink, and so Adam wasn’t drinking much either. Neither was I.” He gestured to a group of five bottles slightly separated from the rest. “That’s from yesterday and today. I didn’t have any of it.”

He paused, but Nikita didn’t say anything, because what was there to say, really? So he picked up her medicine packets, and held them out, as though for her inspection. “These all recommend against drinking while using them, and against mixing them with other medications.”

She shrugged again, striving for nonchalance. “I know that.”

“But you have been. Drinking, and mixing them.”

Not wanting to keep just standing there in the kitchen, as though she were still an operative being reprimanded in his office buried deep under Paris, she turned and headed for the main room, tossing off over her shoulder, “It helps me sleep.”

He followed her, of course. “If you’re still having that much trouble, you should be talking with me about it, and with a doctor.”

She flopped down onto the sofa, deliberately modeling her disaffected sprawl after Isabella’s, knowing it would irritate him. “What’s there to say? I miss her, Michael. I miss Margaret so much. It hurts my heart, all the time.”

He frowned, crossed his arms over his chest and glared at her. “So do I.” 

His unvoiced, ‘and I’m not taking drugs or drinking too much’ hung oppressively in the air.

Refusing to rise to this bait, she shrugged and kept her tone light and dismissive. “Without the meds, in the middle of the night, I wake up. I close my eyes to sleep again, and I watch Margaret fall. Then, when I do sleep, I dream about not catching her. About not catching any of them.” 

She paused, and shot a quick glance his way. He was glowering down at her, unforgiving and hanging on the thin edge of angry. So she went on. “On the really bad nights, I dream she’s here. Alive. With us. And then, I wake up. I lose her all over again.” Her voice broke as she spoke, though she hadn’t planned it. Because, it was all true. She had dreamed that dream again last night. In her dream, Margaret had been practicing with a soccer ball in the lawn below the cabin. It had been glorious. Waking up had been agonizing. She looked up to meet Michael’s gaze head on. “I don’t want to dream.”

After a long searching stare, he said, “and the migraine pills?”

“My head hurts all the time. Not full-on migraines, but always. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but never gone.” She sighed, and went on, anticipating his next question. “The wine blunts the edge, and doesn’t make me feel as loopy as the migraine pills do, so I only take those at night.”

He sat down next her, resting his forearms on his thighs as he leaned towards her. “Did something happen during your trip to the Hague you didn’t tell me about?”

Which meant he’d figured out when she started taking sleeping meds again, after doing without them most of the late spring and early summer. She blew out a long, noisy sigh as she stared at the high widows, black with the night and reflecting odd, watery images of the room below. “No. Everything went exactly like I told you.”

“I see.”

The knowing sympathy in his tone suddenly infuriated her and she folded in on herself and snapped, “I’ll be fine. I’m just having trouble sleeping. Exercise isn’t enough, and the meds help.”

She needed something. She really did. Training with Iz and Kate, working out on her own or with Michael, running, gardening, even occasionally cycling with Adam and Alice, none of it was helping. But it wasn’t fair to abuse Michael’s enthusiasm by using him to fuck herself back to sleep several times a night, either. So, drugs it was. She had also lost her appetite again, but she clung to a pitiful hope that Michael would not dredge that up now.

He stood up and frowned down at her. “It’s all potentially addictive, which you know as well as I do.”

“Yeah.” She glared up at him. “What’s your point?”

“That if you don’t get control of this now, you could end up like your mother.”

Rarely in her life had a metaphorical knife felt so goddamn real. It actually took her a minute to get enough air into her lungs to spit, “I can’t believe you just fucking went there.”

He snapped right back. “Given her history and your own, I can’t believe you let it go as far as it has.”

Her entirely justified outrage blunted by searing guilt, and a sudden spiking pain in her head, she ground out, “I haven’t! And, it’s not!”

“Then stop now. Stop drinking, stop taking the sleeping pills, stop drinking coffee all day to fight off the drugs from the day before. And start eating better.”

So much for hoping he hadn’t noticed she wasn’t eating well. 

He sat down next her again, taking her hand in his own and looking earnestly into her face. “You can do this.”

She couldn’t bear to sit next to him, listening to that patient, loving, encouraging tone. She jerked her hand free from his and jumped up, fight or flight instincts sending adrenaline racing through her veins. She ended up at the window, staring out into the dark, mostly seeing her shadowed reflection and his brighter one, behind her, in the glass. Glaring at his image, trying hard to ignore the throbbing in her temples, she said, “Look, I know you think that just because you’ve pried me off drugs in the past, you can do it again, but this is not the same situation.”

“No.”

“I’m not dependent on this stuff, I don’t need to be handcuffed to a chair, and I don’t need to go through any kind of detox.”

“I know that.” He paused then added, “but our children don’t.”

She whirled to face him. “What?!”

“Kate and Izzy have both spoken to me about your drinking, Adam has talked to me, and Kate even contacted Quinn, asking her to come stage an intervention.”

“Good God! Michael!”

“I’ve held them all off so far, but,” he sat back and crossed his legs, folding his hands in his lap, “I won’t much longer.”

“Shit.” 

“Quinn called me. I told her you’re going to be fine, we’ll be fine.”

She looked into his eyes, and willed him to believe her, willed herself to be telling the truth. “I am, Michael. I really am.”

The concern she could read in his face shaded into something more urgent and more demanding. “I know. But you have to start now.”

“Great. That’s just,” she shook her head in frustration, “Great.” She turned away and crossed her arms, repeating, “I don’t need an intervention. I just need for my daughter not to be dead. Or for me not to be still living, going on without her, the hole in our lives just sealing itself, like she was never here.” 

Nikita closed her eyes, and saw Margaret falling again, her pale blond hair glowing against the hot lights of the stadium. “You can’t do a damn thing about that, can you.”

“No.” He was suddenly in front of her, gripping her upper arms to emphasize his words. “But neither can you. Not sleeping won’t bring her back. Neither will wine. Or pills.”

Resisting the urge to lean into him and weep, she opened her eyes and snarled, “I hate this.”

“It was always the plan, Nikita.”

“Right. Our plan. That I’d have so many children the Section could never take us inside again. That if we lost one or two along the way, it wouldn’t hurt.” She ignored the tears that were beginning to roll down her cheeks again, her voice rough as she said, “It was a really sick plan, Michael.”

His grip on her arms tightened painfully. “We didn’t plan it wouldn’t hurt, we planned to survive it.”

She glared at him and wrenched herself free, stepping back as she spat, “What kind of sick people are we, that we could see the need to make that kind of plan? That we could carry out that kind of plan?”

His expression was steady as he answered. “The kind of people who survived the Section.”

She looked away, twisting her lips in disgust. “The kind of people who survive the death of their child.”

His voice didn’t even waver. “Yes.”

After a long silence, she said, “You know what I hate most, about this plan?”

“No.”

She sagged in defeat, brushing her hand against her wet cheeks in a vain effort to dry them. “That it’s going to work.”

*****

Quinn gestured with her chin and raised her hand to wave, “There they are.”

Zoe followed her gaze across the crowded bar and watched as Michael and Nikita made their way to the table Quinn and Zoe had already claimed. “Wow.” Zoe said, after a few seconds. “They really work the aging rock-star grove, don’t they?”

Quinn looked at Zoe in surprise, then back at Nikita and Michael. Then she had to laugh, because it was an accurate, if unkind, description. They were still wearing their sunglasses as they wove hand-in-hand through the crowd, Michael in front, effortlessly cutting a path through the tangled maze of people and chairs and tables. He had on a battered brown leather motorcycle jacket and well-broken in work trousers over heavy-soled boots, his un-tucked, faded work shirt unbuttoned far enough to expose the tan column of his throat. His hair had gone nearly white at his temples, and was long enough to curl against his collar and a full, white beard covered his cheeks and jaw. Nikita’s jacket was black, with dark red stripes on the sleeves, and she continued to rock black leather trousers better than most women who tried them. She was wearing combat boots, her bright hair was caught in a sloppy braid and her deep red lipstick matched the red in her jacket. Heads turned to watch them as they passed.

Rising to greet them as they drew up at their table, Quinn was relieved to see how much better they both looked up close. Nikita’s face wasn’t as tight and drawn as it had been in the spring, and Michael’s eyes, once he took off his glasses, were as clear and sharp as ever, his warm handshake as firm as it had always been. They were both tanned from their summer in the countryside and windblown from their trip; they’d come on Michael’s bike because the weather was fine. She resolutely ignored the twist of regret snaking low through her belly that she’d brought Zoe along, reminding herself that the point was to introduce them all to each other.

After quick hugs and introductions, they settled back down and gave their orders to a hovering waitress. Michael asked Quinn about her work, which led pretty quickly to international news and politics. Quinn and Nikita would have gone on for hours, but Michael soon recognized that Zoe wasn’t participating and deftly changed the subject to her. Zoe gamely answered all their questions, then switched the subject back to them and their family. It didn’t take much prodding to get Nikita to pull out her phone and start showing off pictures from a recent house party with Michael’s sister and her husband and children.

Looking over Zoe’s shoulder as photos scrolled past, Quinn exclaimed, “Who’s the new girl with Adam?”

“Alice. She works with him, in Africa.” Michael answered.

Leaning forward to squint more closely at the small screen, Quinn said in surprise, “She looks a lot like Marco.”

Michael started sniggering so hard he couldn’t speak. Rolling her eyes at him, Nikita explained. “Yeah. She really does. In person it’s even more obvious. Izzy finally said it out loud, and the next time they were up to the cabin, Gabrielle cornered Alice and said,” Nikita changed her voice to mimic Gabrielle’s accusatory challenge, “did you know you look just like Marco?’ And Alice, totally deadpan, says, ‘Maybe I am Marco. Maybe, like Orlando, I went to sleep a boy and woke up a girl.”

Quinn cackled in delight. “I like her already.”

“Yeah, well, Gabrielle wanted to know who Orlando was, so we watched that old Tilda Swinton film. Now she’s trying to go to sleep a girl and wake up a boy.”

“How’s that working out?”

“About like you’d think.” Nikita snorted, and took another sip of the beer she’d been nursing all evening. “But we’re calling her Oliver anyway, because that’s what she wants.”

“Oliver?”

Nikita shook her head, laughing, “No. I have no idea where that came from either. I am about to ask Adam to have them both up at the same time, though, to clarify that Orlando is fiction.”

“Do you think it means anything?”

“About what? Her future?” Nikita shrugged. “No, I don’t. I think it means that, right now, she wants to be someone else for a while.” 

The band they’d come to hear started their first set about then, and Quinn dragged Michael onto the tiny, already crowded dance floor. She leaned in to his ear to ask, “How’s Nikita?”

He smiled reassuringly. “Doing well.” 

Quinn looked back at the table, where Nikita had stripped down to a deep violet tank top that revealed lots of lightly tanned, freckled skin and very buff arms. She was smiling deeply at Zoe and flirting up a storm. Zoe, no mean flirt herself, was preening under all the attention.

Quinn turned back to Michael, whose gaze, like hers had been, was on Nikita. “And you?” she asked.

He met her eyes, his face open and calm. “I’m fine.”

She actually believed him, so she went on to her next question. “Where else are you going, on this little late summer bike trip?” 

“Brussels, Munich, Geneva, Rome, Barcelona.”

They must have started in Paris, and were in London now. She narrowed her eyes. “What are you up too?”

He smiled disarmingly, “MSF fundraising.”

Not have been born anything even close to yesterday, Quinn didn’t believe him for a second. Or rather, she was perfectly prepared to believe that there was real fundraising going on, but that was the cover, not the purpose of this trip. As for the real purpose, well, given those destinations, and the data she’d been tracking all summer, she had some good guesses. “Don’t blindside me, Michael.”

“I won’t.”

Zoe took his place and they danced until the end of the first set. When they got back to their table, Michael and Nikita weren’t there, though their gloves and jackets still were, so Quinn knew they hadn’t yet left for the night. Dropping into her chair and looking at their empty ones, and then back at Quinn, Zoe said, “They’re a little, a little…” she waved her hands helplessly, “a lot, if you know what I mean!”

Quinn nodded in half-laughing agreement. “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

“Do they ever stop touching each other?”

“At a bar? Away from their kids?” Quinn paused and Zoe made an impatient face, urging her to finish her thought. Quinn shook her head emphatically. “No.”

Even as the flippant response rolled off her tongue, Quinn frowned, suddenly quite sure that something was off somewhere. Thinking back over the evening, she realized that a lot of the touching was one way. In fact, if she’d seen Michael behaving like that with another woman, she would have assumed he was seducing her according to some profile. With Nikita, it meant he wanted her to do something, something she was resisting. And where logical argument failed, Michael was perfectly willing to use any other method at his disposal to get his way.

Zoe was scanning the dance floor. “Where are they?”

After looking for and not finding Nikita’s blond head, Quinn shrugged. Nikita would give in, in the end. She always did where he was concerned. “Getting it on somewhere, probably the alley.”

“What?!”

“You were just complaining about all the foreplay.” Quinn smirked. “They think it’s hot. And funny.” Trying to ease Zoe’s horrified expression, she added, “It’s an old joke.”

Zoe frowned disapprovingly. “You’d never know they lost a daughter a few months ago.”

Quinn knew her voice was too sharp when she snapped, “Yes. You would. If you knew them before.” Softening her expression with effort, she tried to find the words to capture all the ways Margaret’s death had marked them, and floundered. The changes were many, but most were small and together added up more to mood and energy than anything visible or tangible. She finally settled on the true and yet utterly empty cliché, “It’s aged them years in just a few months.” 

That wasn’t it, not really. Michael’s hair was going white and the lines bracketing Nikita’s mouth were more clearly etched than before, to be sure. But it was instead an intense focus, a vibration, darker, angrier and more dangerous than she’d felt in them for years, since Section, that Quinn felt in them now. She knew it was that energy Zoe had picked up on in her crack about rock stars, and not their clothes or their sunglasses at night. It made her shoulders tingle, in that someone-just-walked-on-your-grave sort of way. She wondered again what the future would hold now that Section One was back in the game.

*****

Quinn recognized Nikita’s number and picked up her phone. “Hey. What’s up?”

“How would you feel about a winter holiday in India?”

“India?” That stumped her, coming right out of the blue like that.

“Yeah. We’re headed to Kabul for at least the school year.”

“Wait. What?” Quinn frowned. “I thought you were planning to stay in Paris this winter? Hadn’t the girls picked out schools and everything?”

“That was the plan, but we got back to Paris a week ago, and…” her voice dropped, “it turns out no one wants to stay here.” Nikita switched to videophone and her face filled the small screen. Behind her, Quinn could see the familiar bookcases of their living room in Paris. Nikita shrugged dispiritedly. “It hurts to be here without Margaret. She wanted to be here so much.”

Quinn switched to video as well. She made her voice as sympathetic as she knew how. “I understand.”

“We started to clean out her room, so Sophie and Gabrielle wouldn’t have to share anymore, but then we realized no one wants too, no one is ready for that. We settled for getting rid of everything no one could remember her wearing or using, which turned out to be like, one small sack of things, and leaving the rest right where it is.” Nikita shrugged again and tried for a small smile. She gave up after a second or two and continued, blinking to clear her glassy eyes. “So between the Margaret Museum and the surveillance I know is everywhere...” she trailed off.

“You’re leaving,” Quinn finished the thought for her. “How do the girls feel about Kabul?”

“Pretty good. We gave them several options, and this is the one they liked best. They say they’re ready for mountains again. And there is a good French language school there.”

“Even Kate?”

Nikita shrugged. “Kate wanted everyone else to want to stay in Belgium, but once she accepted that wasn’t happening, she got on board.”

“Hmm.” Based on the alternately furious and petulant emails and texts she’d received when the decision about leaving Belgium for Paris came down, Quinn was pretty sure that was an exceptionally rosy picture of Kate’s actual feelings. But teenager wrangling was not her bailiwick. Thank God. “And you? How are you?”

Nikita smiled, more genuinely this time. “I’m better. Walked past kids playing soccer yesterday and didn’t realize until later that I didn’t cry. When I did cry, but, small steps, yeah?”

Quinn murmured an agreeing sort of sound, and shifted the subject. “How’s your work?”

“Mostly grant writing this year, which I can do from anywhere with more or less regular power. And unlike where we were in Cambodia, it’s relatively easy to get in and out of Kabul.” There was a pause, and Nikita narrowed her eyes. “What aren’t you telling me? Work okay?”

Quinn laughed and shook her head. “You are feeling better.” 

Nikita raised her brows expectantly. “And?”

“Work is fine.”

“Any movement in the force?”

“None I haven’t already forwarded to Michael.”

Nikita fixed her with a hard stare, giving Quinn her best mom-face. Which looked a lot like her best Operations-face, actually. “Go on,” Nikita said.

“I stopped seeing Zoe.”

Nikita dropped her stern expression to exclaim, “What? Why? I’m so sorry!”

“It’s okay. It happens.” Quinn waved off any offer of concern. “Zoe was another one who went from thinking an open relationship was all modern and exciting and sophisticated to feeling all oppressed and jealous at even the idea of it.” 

Nikita shook her head as she smiled in fond exasperation. “You really are an underhanded bitch sometimes.”

“What?” Quinn pretended not to know what she was talking about.

“You have a nasty habit of introducing lovers you want to dump to Michael and me, so we can frighten them away for you.”

Quinn sniffed. “All I’m doing is heightening the contradictions, helping them see the future they prefer is not the one I choose.”

“Fancy talk, girlfriend. You’re still making us the bad guys.”

“Like Michael doesn’t love that.”

“He does not.” Nikita’s frown broke and she smirked. “Much.”

“Anyway, you two are scary.” 

“What? We are not!”

“Did you or did you not fuck Michael in the alley at the bar while you supposed to be dancing?”

Nikita’s expression wavered between smug and irritated. “In the men’s room, and the only way Zoe would have known is if you made a point of telling her.”

“See! You are way out there-“

“We are not. Sex in public places is like, what, kink for beginners? Half-kink? Pre-kink? Anyway,” Nikita waved her hand through the air, dismissing the topic, “we’re talking about you and your habit of dumping pretty young things who want to fall in love with you.”

Quinn snapped, “You bet. I don’t do love, just good times.” 

Seeing Nikita take a deep breath to challenge this, Quinn announced, “Just this week I heard from that lawyer I met last year, and then the very next day Tim-the-marathoner rang me.”

“Which lawyer? The bodybuilder?”

“Eww. No! Turned out to be a pinhead. No. Mina. You met her, remember? The one who does human rights work.”

“Oh yeah! She’s hot.” Nikita got a speculative look in her eye. “If things go well, you could invite her to come to India with us. Or Tim-the-marathoner. It would be nice to meet someone you aren’t trying to get rid of.”

“God, I swear, sometimes I think you’re my mother, not my girlfriend, trying to marry me off before my sell-by date passes.”

Nikita opened her mouth, no doubt to defend herself, then obviously thought better of it. Instead she said, “You’re doing thorough backgrounds, right? What with-“

Quinn cut her off again. “Yes. Mom.” 

After a shocked second, Nikita’s affronted expression abruptly faded and she burst into laughter. “That would work better if you didn’t manage to sound exactly like Iz.”

Their conversation drifted after that, roaming through work, to politics and finally gossip about friends and mutual acquaintances. When Quinn hung up the phone, she hadn’t quite promised about the winter holiday, but a tune from her favorite Bollywood musical was lodged in her head.

*****

Three days before they were to leave for Kabul, the door buzzed just after supper and to Nikita’s dismay, the hearty tones of Mick Schtopel boomed over the intercom.

She opened the door to him and stood blocking his way. “What do you want, Mick?”

“Have a message, and some information, for both of you.”

She glared for a moment longer, then gestured him inside and led the way to Michael’s office, where he was waiting for them. She sat on a corner of the desk and left Mick standing in front of them. Michael said, “What do you want, Mick?

He beamed his widest smile. “I’m here to extend an invitation you simply can’t refuse.”

Neither of them bothered to respond to this.

“Right. Moving on. I’ve been empowered to invite you to serve on the Center’s board of directors.”

Nikita looked at Michael. His expression was as bland as always, but she saw the question in his eyes. She shrugged, indicating that he should speak for them.

“Why?” Michael asked.

“There is a consensus that your current work and identities, in combination with your past histories, will provide a useful, and, perhaps, corrective perspective on the work of the Sections.”

Michael leaned back in his chair and smiled a faint, derisive smile. “Why should we believe the other members of this board would listen to or respond to anything we have to say? I think it would be a waste of our time, and theirs.”

“Ah.” Mick tapped his lips, barely hiding his knowing smirk. “Ah. Well. The people who have proposed your memberships, people, it turns out, with whom you may already be familiar, are fully aware of your considerable powers of, ah, persuasion. Both of you.” 

Nikita exchanged another glance with Michael, and considered shooting Mick in the head should she ever see him again. “And if our recommendations were to close the Sections because they are redundant security agencies with no meaningful role in the world?” she asked.

“You’ll be invited to craft a new role for the new Sections. To have the opportunity to make the new Sections better and more useful than the old ones.” 

Nikita huffed a small, disbelieving snort, but otherwise held her peace.

Michael shifted in his chair. “And if we say no?”

“You were both supposed to serve life-sentences in prison. Nikita served less than a month of her original sentence, and Michael, you served no more than six months of yours. While it is unlikely that anyone can revoke the official, if sealed, pardons you both managed to secure on the basis of your ‘time served’ as it were, in the Section...” Mick trailed off, opening his hands wide and ducking his head with a ‘what can you do about it’ expression.

“Remarkably unsubtle.” Nikita smiled without meaning it. “Rather like the new Section itself.” 

Mick shrugged.

After letting a long silence build, during which Mick tried to stay still but ended up fidgeting, Michael asked. “Our children?”

“Are as hands-off as we can possibly make them.” Mick dropped into a chair with a sigh of relief. “I remember, you see, because I was there,” he shot Nikita a conspiratorial nod as he waggled his finger at her, “that you,” and he spun to waggle his finger at Michael, “working nearly single handedly,” he paused to wink broadly at Nikita, “brought Section One to it’s knees to find Adam.” He stopped waggling his finger at Michael and put on his serious face. “You have much more power and many more assets now. And you wouldn’t be working alone.”

Nikita held Mick’s gaze. “No. Not alone.” 

Mick bowed his head in acknowledgement, a tiny smirk hovering at the corner of his mouth. 

Michael said, “What sort of commitment will this be? Given our current identities and occupations,” he pinned Mick with his haughtiest stare, “we have many worthwhile demands on our time.”

Mick waved his hand airily. “Oh, understood, understood. It’s all very modern, very corporate, three or four times a year for a long weekend in an exotic, posh locale. Nothing more.” Mick laughed then. “And very handsomely recompensed, I might add.”

Nikita blinked her eyes against her still-ready tears as she spat, “What’s the going rate for a daughter, Mick?”

After a blank pause, Mick spoke gently, his voice and his expression both full of apparently sincere regret. “I’m truly sorry Nikita. Everyone is. This is a pale substitute, but it is the best anyone can do.”

When Michael walked back in after showing Mick out, Nikita was blowing her nose and drying off her cheeks with a damp handkerchief. 

Michael came to a stop in front of her, just out of reach. 

Nikita raised her chin. “The world can’t be changed by a handful of people sitting in a fancy resort.” 

“No. But a handful of people can act to remove obstacles to people changing their own worlds. If they have the right tools.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Are you offering to bring me heads on a platter?”

He shrugged, and his expression relaxed into a faint smile. “If you point me to the right heads.”

His tone was light, but when he raised his eyes to hers she saw his grief and his pain and, with a queer little flutter of anticipation and adrenaline licking at her skin, his hunger and his excitement at the new opportunities in front of them. He was one of the very best operatives Section One had ever produced and now he was older, stronger, wilier, and tempered by a life lived fully engaged with the world. 

He made her breath catch and her palms burn.

*****

Two vans pulled up to the departures level of the international terminal at Orly airport and a crowd of people spilled out of them, milling around as well-used bag after well-used bag was pulled out and handed over to the porters. 

In the midst of the unloading, a yelping dog broke free from the group and started to make a run for it. Amidst a child’s screams of “Duke! Duke! Come!” and before the animal had made it more than meter or two, a tall, slim girl, wearing tight dark jeans and a short, fashionable jacket, took two long strides and slammed her heavy boot down on the line. Catching up the leash in her hand, she spun back to the group, her long, light brown ponytail swishing through the air, crying, “Oliver! I told you he was going to make a break for it! Why didn’t you give him to me, like I told you to?!”

“I thought I had him!” declared the little boy who must be Oliver, as he reached for the leash. His close-cropped, wavy auburn hair framed light hazel eyes and the scattered freckles on his nose. “Kate! Give him back,” he cried as the older girl held the frisking dog’s leash up in the air, out of reach of the smaller child.

A tall, broad shouldered, older man, whose short, nearly white hair and beard stood out in sharp contrast to his black sunglasses, expensive black suit and dark grey tee-shirt, reached up and took the leash from the taller girl. “Oliver, can you hold him?” he asked, as he turned to face the younger child.

“Yes!” Oliver cried.

“Dad!” Kate exclaimed, her dark brows snapping down into a frown over bright blue eyes, “You saw what happened! She can’t hold him in this crowd.”

Oliver took the leash his father gave him in both hands, gripping it firmly. “Yes, I can too!”

Kate threw up her hands. “Fine. But you have to catch him if he gets away again.”

Her father smiled and dropped his arm around Kate’s shoulders, pulling her close enough to speak quietly into her ear. Kate, her eyes nearly on a level with his, turned to look at him in surprise, saying in shocked tones, “Dad!” and then she burst into laughter. Her bright blue eyes still sparkling with good humor, she said, “yeah, okay, whatever!” and stepped aside to get out of the way of another large suitcase being passed in their direction.

The last of the bags in the hands of the curbside porters, the vans pulled away and the group turned for the terminal. As they flowed through the doors and in to the ticketing area it was difficult to sort out the relationships of the shifting array of adults, teenagers, children and dogs. Leading the way toward the counter, the older man in black paused to remove his sunglasses and to wait of the rest of his party. A handsome, middle-aged woman caught up with him and linked her arm through his. Her bright blond hair, caught up in a smooth chignon, glowed in the morning sun. She was also dressed in black, a fitted, hip length black leather jacket belted over slim black trousers and black boots. She pushed her own sunglasses to the top of her head and something faintly electric passed between them when their gazes locked. When she turned to look for her children, the source of her daughters’ large, light eyes was clear.

More than one head turned toward them as they passed through the terminal; in her high-heeled boots and piled hair she was taller than he was, and he must have been nearly six feet tall himself. In their tailored, black clothes and their almost-a-swagger stride, they had the kind of glamour that drew the eye. 

Trailing after the couple in black was a mixed group made up of two young men in their middle twenties and four younger children of various ages. Kate and Oliver, another tall, pretty girl about Kate’s age, and a third girl, a head taller than Oliver but clearly still a child and not yet an adolescent. The six young people caught up with the older couple in black as they closed in on the ticketing counter. While they waited in the shorter line for those with first class tickets or frequent flyer status, Oliver continued to hold firmly to the leash of a half grown, mid-sized dog of indefinable bloodlines, frisking and lunging with excitement and interest at all the new sights and smells of the airport. The leash of a matching dog, one equally excited by the terminal, was held by the next oldest girl. Her long, wavy, dark hair was held back from her heart-shaped face with lavender bows that matched her lavender sweater and her lavender nail polish. The last daughter was as tall and slim as her mother, and something in her face, her firmer jaw line and more prominent cheekbones perhaps, suggested that she was older than Kate. Like Kate, her long, light brown hair was caught in a sleek ponytail that showed off her fine bones and her own bright blue eyes, large and well shaped under dark, level brows. 

The two young men standing and chatting with the oldest daughter were lean like her, but dark where she was fair. The younger of the two had an open, cheerful face in marked contrast to the imperious gaze of the older one. Who, when he turned his head to catch something the oldest girl said, revealed a profile that was a ringer for that of the older man and at the same time caught a faint echo of his sister’s face as well.

The family clustered around the counter, getting their boarding passes, checking in their luggage, and after a last round of squealing hugs, the two dogs, safely locked away in their traveling kennels. Once they were done there, they wandered towards the security line. The youngest child walked hand in hand with the mother, the father and his oldest son followed slowly, talking with their heads close together. At the line, they all exchanged hugs, the older son spending slightly longer with each of his parents than with his siblings, and it became clear that neither of the younger men were leaving on this trip.

Then the couple and their four children passed through the security line for frequent travelers, handing over their tickets and well-worn passports to the security agents stationed there. Once through, they re-collected their coats and bags, turned and waved goodbye to the young men, and then vanished from sight, blending into the crowded concourse beyond.

***Fin***

**Author's Note:**

> Just FYI: Mediciens Sans Frontiers/Doctors Without Borders do NOT employ anyone remotely like Michael Samuelle to protect their operations with armed operatives. These organizations have been pressed to do so many times, and they have lost equipment, supplies, operations and personnel to direct assualt and kidnapping. However they consistently refuse to alter their committment to non-violence. I applaud their strength of will in the face of a dangerous world.
> 
> On the other hand, had someone like Michael Samuelle been available at that particular place and time, well, who knows what might have happend, hmm? ;-)


End file.
